Effectiveness of Educational Programs for Chronic Kidney Disease Patients

Running head: HEALTHCARE
Assessment 3
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1HEALTHCARE
Task 2 (b)- The three highest pieces of evidence that were retrieved after conducting a
comprehensive search of the electronic databases are given below:
1. Lopez-Vargas, P.A., Tong, A., Howell, M. and Craig, J.C., 2016. Educational
interventions for patients with CKD: a systematic review. American Journal of
Kidney Diseases, 68(3), pp.353-370.
2. Joboshi, H. and Oka, M., 2017. Effectiveness of an educational intervention (the
Encourage Autonomous Self-Enrichment Program) in patients with chronic kidney
disease: A randomized controlled trial. International journal of nursing studies, 67,
pp.51-58.
3. Tamura, M.K., Li, S., Chen, S.C., Cavanaugh, K.L., Whaley-Connell, A.T.,
McCullough, P.A. and Mehrotra, R.L., 2014. Educational programs improve the
preparation for dialysis and survival of patients with chronic kidney disease. Kidney
international, 85(3), pp.686-692.
The aforementioned three pieces of evidence were selected for this critical appraisal
owing to the fact that they were in alignment with the phenomenon under investigation and
helped in drawing definite conclusions on the effectiveness of educational programs in
enhancing knowledge among participants regarding chronic kidney disease (CKD). Levels of
evidence, commonly referred to as hierarchy of evidence are typically assigned to research
studies, depending on the procedural excellence of their design, rationality, and applicability
to health and social care. Based on the grades of recommendation by Ackley (2008) the three
studies used for this assignment belong to level I (systematic review), II (randomised
controlled trial), and IV (cohort), respectively. The abstracts for all the three studies are
attached in appendix.

2HEALTHCARE
Task 3- Lopez-Vargas et al. (2016) conducted a systematic review to determine the role
of educational interventions upon patients suffering from CKD. This study is in accordance
with the fact that public knowledge on this type of renal disease is comparatively poor, and
an increase in awareness and knowledge will help in early detection of the ailment, thus
enhancing health promotion, and a decrease in rates of chronic diseases (Davison et al. 2015).
The researchers therefore accurately addressed a well-focused research question and
elaborated on the fact that educational interventions might prove beneficial in averting the
progress of CKD, thus preventing subsequent onset of comorbidities. The researchers clearly
stated the inclusion and exclusion criteria and extracted both RCT and non-RCT that were
published till 2015. The search strategy was also appropriate since the researchers used
Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) in MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and The Cochrane
Library. Furthermore, appropriateness of the search process can be associated with the
independent article retrieval and assessment by two reviewers (Moher et al. 2015). This was
followed by use of the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) Review
Group standards, and Cochrane tool for randomized studies for minimising potential errors,
thus negating bias in the extracted hits. Combination of the individual article results was also
a correct procedure since the researchers took into account a taxonomy framework that was
based on educational intervention for CKD, delivery style, teaching style, intensity,
personnel, and content. The results were accurately presented and illustrated the fact that
there are a range of educational interventions such as, telephone follow-up, face-to-face
teaching, and written information. All of these were found to bring about an enhancement in
the knowledge on CKD amid the patients, and also helped them in better self-management of
the condition. Nonetheless, they could not conduct a meta-analysis that prevented them from
simplifying the intricacy of research, besides preventing representation of the data in terms of
meaningful statistics (Schmidt and Hunter 2014).