mortiz058

Our monthly Twitter #ResNetSLT Journal Club which began in January 2016 has been a great success. Nine papers have been discussed during the year, with up to 47 participants being involved in the chats. Please click here for a summary of the papers discussed and the stats of the impact and reach to linked Twitter accounts. The highest to date was almost 750,000 accounts from a one hour Tweetchat. The engagement with our online Journal Club has shown that geography is no barrier, with people joining us from Australia as well as several countries in mainland Europe. We've also been delighted that people from many other professions have joined our discussions – and that's the message that everyone is welcome. On several occasions the paper authors have joined the discussions – a feature that we hope to continue next year. Each month we've either chosen an open access paper, or been able to negotiate with the relevant publishers for them to provide a direct link to our select...

Cochrane UK have launched an 'Understanding Evidence' campaign looking at common errors and misunderstandings, resources and initiatives that can help with making sense of evidence and highlighting opportunities to get involved with others with an interest in evidence. Please click here for more information.

In place of our usual monthly #ResNetSLT Journal Club Tweetchat in August, the IALP Conference in Dublin provided an exciting opportunity for some face-to-face meetings. We used the hashtag #ResNet_Rendezvous to co-ordinate meetings linked to @IALPDublin2016 workshops on the theme of EBP and promoting practice-based and practice-led clinical research. It was great to meet new contacts and we had such amazing support from the Irish host association @IASLT - special thanks to Adrian Bradley , Aoife McGuire  and Pauline Ackermann . It was also lovely to meet up with Margaret Walshe , Rena Lyons , Arlene McCurtin , Yvonne Wren  and so many others too. Our #ReSNet_Rendezvous 'tweet meets' also proved to work well as twitter clinics – we're all learning together and it's great to be able to share tips we've picked up. A warm welcome in particular to Linda Schrey , Weibke Schraff and Maria Vlassopoulos . It was great that we also managed to keep in touch throughout the...

Our seventh Tweetchat 'That doesn't translate’: the role of evidence-based practice in disempowering speech pathologists in acute aphasia management’ took place on Wednesday 27th July. We were delighted by the reach of the chat, hosted by Dr Hazel Roddam , with 37 participants sending 251 tweets that were delivered to 126,391 linked accounts. Thank you to everyone who contributed and followed the chat. Participants included SLTs from across the UK and in Australia as well as other AHPs. We know that people from other EU countries were also watching the conversation. We were particularly delighted that a number of people joined the Tweetchat for the first time – hope you enjoyed it! The paper reports an exploratory study of speech and language therapists working in Australia with patients who have acute aphasia and it uncovered some startling insights into the direct impact of professionals' values and attitudes on their clinical practice. The SLTs in this study reported fee...

Our sixth #ResNetSLT Tweetchat 'Are your treatment decisions evidence or craft-based?' took place on Wednesday 29th June. Hosted by Mark Jayes  and Dr Emma Pagnamenta  the chat was based around this article . You can find the pre-chat information and questions here . It was another lively chat with 28 participants, 268 tweets and a potential reach of 171,046. Thank you to everyone who contributed and followed the discussion. The inspiration for the chat came from a study carried out by McCurtin & Clifford in 2015 who asked SLTs in Ireland about how they make treatment decisions. Current understanding of EBP suggests we make decisions using evidence from four sources: i) research; ii) practice - our own and our colleagues' clinical experience; iii) individual patient characteristics; iv) contextual information. The survey results suggested that the SLTs who responded make treatment decisions using evidence from two main sources: clinical experience (e.g. 'craft'...

Our fifth Tweetchat 'So good to be involved: PPI in research' took place on Wednesday 25th May. We were delighted by the reach of the chat, hosted by Dr Rebecca Palmer and Dr Emma Pagnamenta , with 37 participants sending 482 tweets that were delivered to 728,787 linked accounts. We were particularly pleased by the interdisciplinary nature of the chat and the involvement of #whywedoresearch . Thank you to everyone who contributed and followed the chat. Patient and public involvement (PPI) is promoted at all stages of research, with everyone having a right to be involved. However, the high level of communication skills often required precludes the involvement of people with communication difficulties. We began the chat by sharing examples of how patients/service users are being involved in research. Many different ways of involving patients and the public were shared. These ranged from advisory groups, inputting to study materials, giving research ideas, using video conversatio...

Our fourth #ResNetSLT Twitter journal club took place on Wednesday, 27th April, 2016. It proved to be another lively discussion with 15 participants, 135 tweets and a potential reach of 133,000. This is such an important topic if we are to sustain health and the wider care system whilst managing demand, because staffing resource is the largest cost to any service delivery and is becoming increasingly scrutinised. Having tools to evidence workload demand and capacity, and to profile workforce requirements, are vital for quality care. In the Tweetchat the challenges we all face in clinical services were discussed, and experiences of approaches and processes for workforce planning were shared which included, surveys, time and motion/diary tools, point prevalence studies and manual counting. One of the greatest points of discussion was the challenges agreeing a minimum data set to enable consistent and comparable measurement/benchmarking. Participants shared experience of self-creating st...