Ability to assess claims about treatment effects among bachelor students in health sciences: a protocol for feasibility testing a course in Evidence-Based Health Care

Abstract Background Various health claims about products, remedies, and treatments are everywhere, and many fail to assess these claims. It is therefore important to enable people to think critically about such claims. Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet) developed and implemented an educational intervention as a part of a mandatory course in Evidence-Based Health Care (EBHC) for bachelor students in health sciences to increase their critical thinking skills by enabling them to critically assess health claims about treatment effects in the media and make informed choices. A relevant next step is feasibility testing of the EBHC course. Objective This protocol describes the plan of testing and adjusting methods to assess effects of an educational intervention in skills to assess health claims. In particular the assessment methods' feasibility, reliability and validity will be investigated. Feasibility applied to the evaluation tool refers to acceptance by students of a following efficacy trial. Reliability will be investigated in terms unidimensionality of the underpinning construct, while validity refers to the ability of the evaluation tool to detect effect achieved by the training intervention (responsiveness). Participants, methods, and analysis Eligible participants will be bachelor students in health sciences at OsloMet attending the EBHC course. Participants in sub-study 1 and 2 were recruited in 2020/21 and 2021/22. Participants for sub-study 3 and 4 will be recruited during autumn 2022. Both quantitative and qualitative methods will be used to feasibility test the intervention. We will use generalised linear models from cross-sectional surveys and thematic analysis of open-ended questions from cross-sectional surveys and focus group interviews to assess the acceptance of the EBHC course among students (sub-study 1). We will use Rasch analysis to evaluate the psychometric properties of the questionnaires from cross-sectional surveys (sub-study 2 and 3). Generalised linear models will be used to estimate learning outcome from uncontrolled before-after studies (sub-study 4). Ethical considerations The studies to be carried out in 2022 were approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD) on 28 July 2022 (Reference number 935258)