How can you tell if the bold headlines seen on social media are truly touting the next big thing or if the article isn't worth the paper it's printed on? Understanding Medical Studies, will provide you with the tools and skills you need to critically interpret medical studies, and determine for yourself the difference between good and bad science. The course covers study-design, research methods, and statistical interpretation. It also delves into the dark side of medical research by covering fraud, biases, and common misinterpretations of data. Each lesson will highlight case-studies from real-world journal articles. By the end of this course, you'll have the tools you need to determine the trustworthiness of the scientific information you're reading and, of course, whether or not your Facebook friend is wrong. This course was made possible in part by the George M. O'Brien Kidney Center at Yale.

In this course, you’ll learn to collect and care for the data gathered during your trial and how to prevent mistakes and errors through quality assurance practices. Clinical trials generate an enormous amount of data, so you and your team must plan carefully by choosing the right collection instruments, systems, and measures to protect the integrity of your trial data. You’ll learn how to assemble, clean, and de-identify your datasets. Finally, you’ll learn to find and correct deficiencies through performance monitoring, manage treatment interventions, and implement quality assurance protocols.

This web-based video course focuses on the importance of prevention and risk reduction in decreasing cancer occurrences. All learners will need to watch the video modules, read associated articles, and achieve a passing score of 80% on quizzes in order to complete the course. After completing the course, learners will receive a link to claim continuing medical and nursing education credit. DESCRIPTION Next Generation Choices Foundation (NGCF or Less Cancer), lesscancer.org, in conjunction with the University of Virginia and American University, promotes a prevention paradigm for addressing the alarming trend of increasing cancer incidences and raises awareness of cancer prevention to make risk reduction and prevention a vital part of the cancer paradigm for all people. This is a departure from previous treatment-focused approaches that talked about beating, conquering, or curing cancer. Many cancers are preventable by reducing risk factors, such as PFAS and lead corrosion in water supply and infrastructure, use of tobacco products, ultraviolet light exposure, asbestos exposure, specific contaminants and pollution sources, disparities and inequities, and promoting healthy lifestyle choices, such as diet, exercise, and nutrition. Visit the FAQs below for important information regarding 1) Activity faculty and their credentials; 2) Accreditation and Credit Designation statements; 3) Commercial support disclosure statement; 4) Disclosure of financial relationships for every person in control of activity content and their role in the activity; 5) Date of original release and Termination or expiration date.

In this course, you will learn how you can use imagery and imagery interventions to help with symptom management and healing, as well as to enhance overall health and wellbeing. You will experience a variety of imagery interventions and evaluate how they might be helpful in providing relief or enhancing quality of life. By the end of the course, you will know how to assess if guided imagery is appropriate in specific situations or with specific patients. You will be able to find and evaluate guided imagery scripts and recordings you might use. Most importantly, you will learn how to write and record effective guided imagery scripts of your own for specific needs at work or in your personal life. Continuing Education Credit This course has been designed to meet Minnesota Board of Nursing continuing education requirements for 14.5 contact hours and may be eligible for CE credit from other professional boards that allow self-documenting of continuing education activities. It is your responsibility to check with your regulatory board to confirm this course meets your local requirements and, if necessary, to provide them with the certificate of completion you get if you pay for and fulfill all the requirements of this course.

This course focuses on participatory approaches in research, known as 'public involvement' in the UK. You'll specifically, consider why citizens and patients would be involved in research and explore participatory approaches across and within the research cycle in more detail, diving into questions such as: - what kinds of participation can be undertaken at each of the 7 stages of the cycle? - how can you utilise participation in research? - what examples of using participatory approaches exist in research? While this course, as with the rest of the specialisation, focuses on public health and ways of involving citizens and patients across and within the research cycle, these concepts apply to other disciplines and kinds of research too. So, you don't have to be a public health specialist or work in healthcare to gain insight from this course. If you would like to learn more about the theories and core principles of participation within a public health context, we suggest taking Introduction to Participatory Approaches in Public Health. If you're planning a research project and want to include participatory approaches, explore our course Applying Participatory Approaches in Public Health Settings.

This course aims to teach people how to enhance the recruitment of racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials. Key topics include the importance of diversity in clinical trials, barriers and facilitators to participation in clinical research, community engagement, effective communication, educating about clinical trials, provider outreach, effective prescreening and enrollment, person-centered consent, and retention. Anyone with the potential to recruit can benefit from this course, whether working in a clinical setting or in the community. The course is split into 8 weeks. You may work at your own pace and finish the course faster, if you would like. We encourage you to take the quizzes to help you learn the material. The course is free to enroll and take. You will be offered the option of purchasing a certificate of completion, which you will receive if you successfully complete the course requirements. This can be an excellent way of staying motivated! Financial aid is also available. Acknowledgments: We would like to acknowledge the following members from the Center for Knowledge Management at Vanderbilt University Medical Center for their expertise and ongoing insightful contribution in the development and implementation of the course: Sheila Kusnoor, PhD, Elizabeth Frakes, MSIS, Helen Naylor, MS, Mallory Blasingame, MA, Taneya Koonce, MSLS, MPH, and Nunzia Bettinsoli Giuse, MD, MLS. We would also like to acknowledge ArtMagic Labs, particularly Casey Culver, John Martinez, and Robert Eva, for their outstanding work in filming and editing the videos for the course. The Recruitment Innovation Center and members of the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance lead the efforts behind the Faster Together project. Together they have led the development of this training. This work is supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, under the award number U24TR001579.

This course provides demonstrations and exercises for performing common genomics-based analysis tasks of bacterial sequence data. It uses PATRIC, the PathoSystems Resource Integration Center, as the platform for analysis. PATRIC is the NIH/NIAID-funded bacterial Bioinformatics Resource Center, providing comprehensive bacterial genomic data with integrated analysis tools and visualizations. PATRIC also provides a private workspace where users can upload and analyze their own data. Course participants will gain skills needed to do comparative analysis of bacterial genomes, starting with raw sequence data.The lessons in the first module cover genome assembly, annotation, phylogenetic tree construction, and protein family / proteome comparisons. Each lesson builds on the previous, creating a complete baseline analysis workflow.

This course will provide you with the key knowledge and tools to understand the fundamentals and practical implications of precision medicine, its opportunities and challenges. It will address precision-medicine era diagnostics, treatment selection, genetic counseling, public health interventions, and biomedical research. It will also deal with data science and ethical issues. From genomic analysis and genetic counseling to cancer biomarkers, from risk assessment of chronic diseases to the understanding of gene-environment interactions, from pharmacogenomics to multi-omics data integration, experts will walk you through the many aspects of precision medicine, from the bench to the bedside and to population health. Designed for students with a bachelor-level training in life sciences, this course will also be useful for professionals who are increasingly expected to deal with precision medicine, including primary care physicians and other first-line healthcare professionals, cancer and non-communicable diseases specialists, public health policy and decision makers, as well as biomedical researchers and drug developers. Experts from the multiple domains of genetics and genomics, oncology, pharmacology, data sciences, ethics, and biomedical research will provide you with a comprehensive, multi-faceted overview of precision medicine, richly illustrated with practical examples and clinical case studies, and peppered with formative evaluations. Whether you are interested or intrigued by topics such as “genethics”, the analysis of exome sequencing, precision diabetes management, hereditary cancers, the ongoing revolution of genetic technologies, genome-exposome interactions, the pharmacogenetics of opioids, data deidentification, blockchain-base patient-consent documentation, or proteomics and biomarkers, this course will explain the concepts, offer insights and present concrete examples, thus providing you with an overall understanding of the rapidly evolving field of precision medicine. - update - The contents of this course have been updated and important corrections have been implemented thanks to learners' feedback. Many thanks to them!

We will introduce methods to perform systematic reviews and meta-analysis of clinical trials. We will cover how to formulate an answerable research question, define inclusion and exclusion criteria, search for the evidence, extract data, assess the risk of bias in clinical trials, and perform a meta-analysis. Upon successfully completing this course, participants will be able to: - Describe the steps in conducting a systematic review - Develop an answerable question using the “Participants Interventions Comparisons Outcomes” (PICO) framework - Describe the process used to collect and extract data from reports of clinical trials - Describe methods to critically assess the risk of bias of clinical trials - Describe and interpret the results of meta-analyses

This course specifically explores approaches and tools and how to apply them in public health settings. Students will learn how to critically analyse the power dynamics present between multidisciplinary stakeholders and appreciate the need for reciprocity between those delivering and those receiving health care; between both those conducting and those participating in research. They will also learn how to select and evaluate different participatory approaches to apply these to public health programmes and/or research. Tools with which to do this include undertaking a stakeholder-mapping exercise and needs assessment, including a critical and reasoned narrative to justify the approach. While this course, as with the rest of the specialisation, focuses on public health and ways of involving citizens and patients in programmes and research, these concepts apply to other disciplines too. So, you don't have to be a public health specialist or work in healthcare to gain insight from this course. If you would like to learn more about the theories and core principles of participation within a public health context, we suggest taking Introduction to Participatory Approaches in Public Health. If you're planning a research project and want to learn more about participation in resaerchs, explore our course Public Involvement in Research.