The PedsCCM Evidence-Based Journal Club: An Invitation to Pediatric Critical Fellowship Program Participation

Dear Pediatric Critical Care Fellowship Program Director:

As you may know we have started an evidence based pediatric critical care area on the PedsCCM Web Site: The PedsCCM Evidence-Based Journal Club. This resource is intended to provide critical appraisals, following the User's Guide to the Medical Literature series in JAMA, of current literature pertinent to pediatric critical care. All appraisals submitted to the EB Journal Club are peer reviewed by a group of intensivists with experience or training in evidence based medicine prior to publication on the site. *

We believe that the skills of critical appraisal are vital to the development of a comprehensively trained pediatric intensivist. Just as many primary residency programs in pediatrics, medicine, and surgery are initiating efforts to include the principles of evidence based medicine - which are based on systematic assessment of the evidence behind the care of individual patients - we think these skills and attitudes should be incorporated into pediatric critical care fellowship programs. Since "learning by doing" continues to be an effective tool, we would like to involve fellows (and interested faculty) at your program to become involved in the EB Journal Club by contributing critical reviews on a regular basis. This idea was discussed and supported at the recent meeting of fellowship directors at the Pediatric Critical Care Colloquium in Hot Springs, Arkansas and in San Antonio at the SCCM.

We suggest that participating programs submit a total of 6 reviews per year (that's 6 per program, not per fellow) to the journal club. The editors can help you in choosing articles (or you may ask for ones to be assigned) and the appropriate "User's Guide to the Medical Literature" or other article to assist you will be provided with a simple text template to fill out. We can then work directly with authors to edit the reviews for consideration of publication in the EB Journal Club on PedsCCM.

You may optionally set up a more structured curriculum to ensure more comprehensive coverage of the principles of evidence-based medicine that we can assist you in developing. Either way, performing these reviews regularly should provide excellent substrates for local "physical" journal clubs - which many programs already have in place - (as opposed the "virtual" one on the web site).

We hope the EB Journal Club can serve as both an educational experience for the fellows and faculty submitting reviews and provide the global community of pediatric critical care (over 35 countries access PedsCCM each month) peers and trainees with a valuable resource of literature appraisals.

We encourage you to think about this, visit the EB Journal Club (and the associated EBM Resource list), and let us know your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Barry Markovitz MD
St. Louis Children's Hospital
Washington University School of Medicine
markovitz@pedsccm.org

Adrienne Randolph MD
Boston Children's Hospital
Harvard Medical School
randolph_a@hub.tch.harvard.edu

* Because this is a peer-reviewed publication medium, and a recent statement from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors concludes that "electronic publishing (which includes the Internet) is publishing," authors may rightfully claim academic credit for reviews published in the EB Journal Club. (JAMA 1997; 277: 1808.)

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