Picot Question
(P) In elderly patients of 60 to 80 with chronic diseases like diabetes, (I) does patient education intervention such as exercises 30 minutes a day and healthy food diets, (C) compared to only medication treatments, (O) increase their health knowledge and improve their health status (T) in a period of 6 months?
Search Strategy Conducted
The search for evidence was performed on several electronic databases, including Medline, CINAHL, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Excerpta Medica Database, and PubMed. The search terms used in the process included “chronic disease,” “diabetes,” “patient education,” “exercise,” “diet,” and “health knowledge.” Once the database results were exhausted, dedicated search engine Google Scholar was used in order to locate the studies that were not detected in the previous step. The search results were initially limited to a time frame of 10 years since it is considered sufficient for relevant results in the given area. The possibility of including older studies was reserved for the scenario where the number of new sources would be deemed insufficient. No ethical considerations were included in the search strategy since the data was obtained solely from the sources published in scholarly journals with respective criteria.
Critical Appraisal of the Evidence Performed
The located sources underwent a quality appraisal procedure in order to ensure the validity of evidence. The quality of evidence was determined individually and independently for each study using the hierarchy of evidence. Qualitative studies were considered insufficient for the purpose of the project due to lack of specificity in terms of patient outcomes. Thus, sources that were evaluated as level V through VII were not incorporated in the project. The priority was given to well-designed randomized controlled trials as well as systematic reviews and meta-analyses of such trials (level II and I, respectively), followed by controlled trials without randomization (level III), and cohort studies (level IV) (Krueger Library, n.d.). The results of quality appraisal were compared between researchers, and all emerging disagreements were discussed until a consensus was reached.
References
Joanna Briggs Institute. (2017a). Checklist for qualitative research. Web.
Joanna Briggs Institute. (2017b). Checklist for randomized controlled trials. Web.
Krueger Library. (n.d.). Evidence based practice toolkit. Web.