Critical Appraisal Skills Stage (CASP) (RCT)

This part of the assignment aims to examine and critically appraise its contents using a standardised assessment tool for the preselected paper. The title of this research paper is, “Community falls prevention for people who call an emergency ambulance after a fall: randomised controlled trial” (Logan et al., 2010).
The objective of this Randomised controlled trial (RCT) paper; is to evaluate whether rehabilitation services can help to reduce the rate of falls among older people in the community who called an emergency ambulance, but were not taken to the hospital (Logan et al., 2010). RCT is defined as an experimental test of participants, which measures the impact of intervention on a particular outcome by conducting a controlled experiment
CASP was originated in Oxford, which produces various appraisal tools for different methodologies; such as, RCT, systematic reviews and so forth (CASP, 2013). Therefore, CASP RCT checklists provide a total of eleven questions, which guides an individual to determine the quality and validity of the research study (Cleyle and Glynn, 2006). These eleven questions are then divided into three sections; which includes (A) “Are the results of the trial valid?”, (B) “What are the results?”, (C) “Will the results help locally?” (CASP, 2013). This checklist can be accessed and downloaded on the internet through the CASP website (http://media.wix.com/ugd/dded87_40b9ff0bf53840478331915a8ed8b2fb.pdf).
(A) Are the results of the trial valid?
1) Did the trial address a clearly focused issue?
Yes, the trial did address a clearly focused issue by using the PICO framework in the abstract and other parts of the paper. PICO framework is a useful method for searching the key terms and focusing on the effectiveness of the studies; which comprises of ‘Population’, ‘Intervention’, ‘Comparison’ and ‘Outcome’ (Craig and Smyth,
The rationale of an allocation concealment, was to ensure that researchers and participants were unaware of the upcoming assignments until the participant has been accepted into the trial (Straus et al., 2011). This is an important factor in reducing allocation bias, which usually occurred if there was a systematic difference between the participants that were allocated to treatment (Sedgwick, 2013). However, PAL is responsible in assigning the allocation, therefore, this may lead to an allocation bias in the study.
After allocation, the fall rehabilitation team would then notify the intervention group through letters. This to inform that their local falls prevention team would approach the participants for the rehabilitation programme. While the participants from control group were informed by the researchers through letters, that there will be no additional study intervention after the recruitment. In addition, they were being advised to use only the existing medical and social services instead.
3) Were patients, health workers and study personnel