Systematic Reviews in Intervention Research (online)

Systematic reviews play a crucial role in this era of Evidence Based Medicine and clinical guidelines. Systematic reviews use a systematic and transparent approach to identify all relevant articles, appraise the risk of bias, examine sources of variation, and, if appropriate, meta-analyse the results of the primary studies.

This course will offer a mix of lectures and practicals that will help the student to perform all of these steps in practice. In addition, specific challenges to systematic reviews and new developments will be highlighted.

Our courses are aimed at clinical researchers, nurses, general practitioners, and other health professionals who want to improve their skills in epidemiology, statistics and (clinical) research.

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• Explain the rationale for performing a systematic review
• List the key steps of a systematic review
• Formulate a proper review question addressing a therapeutic dilemma
• Understand the design of a comprehensive and efficient search strategy to identify relevant RCT’s in electronic bibliographic databases
• Explain the main types of bias in a therapeutic study
• Assess primary studies (RCT) for their risk of bias and report these findings
• Explain the difference between fixed and random effects approach and their assumptions
• Perform & interpret the findings of a meta-analysis (fixed & random approach)
• Interpret the different measures of heterogeneity
• Interpret the results of a meta-regression model
• List and explain the different types of reporting bias
• Critically appraise systematic reviews

3 March 2025, 3 weeks, 14 hrs per week

Please note, even though you can manage your own time our courses are not intended as individual education. By learning together you will gain depth in your learning process, which is very important. Therefore flexibility from students, a positive attitude towards teachers and peers and the willingness to learn together and help each other is invaluable to our courses

Utrecht University & UMC Utrecht employees

Employees of Utrecht University and the UMCU are eligible for a 10% discount on online courses from the MSc Epidemiology programme with Elevate Health.

Utrecht University & UMC Utrecht students

All students attending Utrecht University and the University Medical Center Utrecht are eligible for a 10% discount on online courses from the MSc Epidemiology programme with Elevate Health.