Research. Audit. Presentations. Publications. Conferences. All key buzzwords that you’ve probably heard flying about. But what’s the “take home”? Well, research can be primary (you collect data yourself, analyse and write it up) or secondary (review other people’s research and synthesise your own ideas based on it). Common to both is starting with an important, objective research question to add value and progress the field. Audits, in contrast to research, aims to evaluate a service, compare it to a standard and see if it can be improved. All of this can result in presentations at conferences (either a poster or oral) and even publications (the write-up of your research is published in a scientific journal). So why get involved? There are several reasons why people want to get involved in research. Let’s break it down:

Primary research in a nutshell involves you coming up with a research question, designing a study, collecting data directly, analysing it and then discussing the findings. Here is a concise stepwise approach to this type of research.

Secondary research usually follows the same steps as primary research except for first-hand data collection. So, it still involves coming up with a research question, designing a study, using pre-collected data, analysing it and then discussing the findings. However, unlike primary research, it rarely needs ethics approval or time and resource consuming first-hand data collection. Here’s a stepwise approach to getting involved in this type of research.

An audit, in contrast to research, involves a process of evaluating a service (e.g. “how well is a GP practice recognising cancer red flag symptoms and referring via the 2-week-wait pathway?”). The service is compared against a standard (the optimal performance it should be at as defined by NICE guidelines etc.). If the service falls below the standard, then the reasons for this is analysed and changes are designed to improve the service. The changes are implemented and another “cycle of auditing” is done to see if the changes have improved the service such that it now meets the standard or better. This whole process is termed an audit.

This is a piece of secondary research I carried out at Harvard University during my elective. I was lucky enough to present this work at the Plastic Surgery Conference at the Royal Society of Medicine. Click here to have a look at the poster including a full list of the references. This should give you a good idea of how to structure a poster.