This course will teach the methods of systematic review and meta-analysis that are key inputs in health technology assessment and integral to evidence based medicine.

This course will be delivered as a 3 full-day face-to-face course in Glasgow, comprising 11 subject areas.

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Written Assignment/Coursework - Students will be given and a series of research questions, papers to undertake critical appraisal, and data sets with summary statistics taken from the papers. They will need to answer the research questions by applying methods from the course and writing up as a report (1500 words).

This course aims to equip students with the necessary skills so they can design and conduct high quality systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Critically assess the role of evidence synthesis (including systematic review, meta-analysis of direct, indirect and mixed treatment evidence and realist synthesis) in evidence and technology assessments

■ Create research questions within the systematic review framework and be able to set appropriate eligibility criteria

■ Critically analyse primary studies according to their risk of bias and present results appropriately

■ Create, interpret and critically discuss output after undertaking meta-analyses of different types of data (dichotomous and continuous) and using different approaches (frequentist and Bayesian; fixed and random effects models)

■ Critically assess bias and heterogeneity assessments (cumulative meta-analysis, sub-group analysis and meta-regression)

■ Critically appraise the important aspects of network meta-analysis (making in-direct comparisons)

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.