Research is an essential part of my professional life, as I am sure is true for everybody else in this course. I am a physician and we rely on research for most of our decision making. I subscribe to a few peer reviewed journals. I will confess that I don’t read all the studies reported in them. I mostly peruse the titles for articles that are relevant to my specialty, skipping those that report advances in non related specialties. Because of the sheer volume of research that is going on in the medical field and the necessity to keep up with evidence based practices, it is not possible to read every article that is published. I am not an academic practitioner, my interest is in the clinical applicability of the research. In the interest of time, I end up reading the abstract, and sometimes the detailed discussion and conclusions, mostly skipping the methods. This is true for the trusted journals in my field. If I were to come across a study/article from a source that I am not familiar with, I do try to read it critically to try and discern if the study was conducted using the appropriate methods and data analysis for scientific inquiry.
In addition to relying on research for keeping ourselves updated, we also use the latest reports of advances to treat our patients appropriately . I am not in a formal leadership role in my organization. But as a physician I rely in research and updates to formulate what is the best advice for my patients. In this sense I am the defacto leader of the patient care team. Recently there have been some discussions and changes in Blood pressure guidelines. We are implementing changes in our practice to reflect those. This involves training and education our staff as well as educating our patients. These recommendations are mostly based on recent peer reviewed research reports, along with some input from past experience as well expert opinion. Another example of research guiding my practice is the current influenza season. We are treating and providing prophylaxis to our patients based on currently available research and our organizational policy, guided by past experiences. In this context we also follow the recommendations from the county health department, which I believe can be categorized as expert opinion.
I am not an expert in research methods, and think of myself more as a semi-informed user. I am looking forward to learning more about leadership and scholarly inquiry. ‘Evidence-based leadership’ is a new concept for me, and I am excited to explore it further.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with research Simarjit. It is good to know that you already have some familiarity with research in your practice. It is my hope that this course will create new possibilities for using research as a tool in your leadership practice as well.