Network

The SHED leaderboard is live!

Hi everyone; a bit of a break since our last post but I've got an update for you.

To everyone working hard in the SHED study: thank you so much for all of your hard work and dedication. We are so lucky as a relatively nascent trainee network to have such enthusiastic researchers working with us.

It's not all take-take-take, however. I've been slaving away over a hot laptop to bring you a bit of fun - we now have a way of tracking how many patients we are recruiting to SHED.

It can be found here: tinyurl.com/ternshedmap

SHED Leaderboard

This has been inspired by the brilliant map for the PERUKI research project Bronchstart.

Now, this is only as accurate as the data that is input onto REDCap as it captures data from that. It is also not updated live, as that would require an awful lot of coding far beyond my abilities and it would require I find out what an APIs is. For now, it will be a map that I update each week. When I update it each week I will be keeping track of new recruits targeted. Each month I will be allocating fabulous prizes to a centre's recruiting members. These include the Official TERN Badge (TM) or an Official TERN Lanyard. I have big bags of both.

Whilst it is easy in centres with a lot of research infrastructure to recruit patients, I also want to ensure that the centres with only one or two people working or in slightly smaller centres get a fair crack of the whip, so I will be applying dense and intensely complicated statistical analyses to attempt to compensate for smaller centres or fewer people working. The next draw will be the 17th December, so until then, I want you all to get cracking. There's only one event worth looking forward to in December, and that's this prize draw.

Prizes are below:

So, have a look at the map and start planning with your centre how you're going to sweep to victory.

My warmest regards,

Rob

TERN Fellow

by Robert Hirst

TERN April Update

Good morning everyone; time for a TERN April Update!

I just wanted to write a little post updating people on a few things that were going on.

CERA 1

The results of the first, acceleration phase of the CERA study has now been published. It can be found on the EMJ and if you're a collaborator and eager to see your name in lights - can be found here on PubMed. Please tweet and share about it! We'll be posting an infographic to boot.

CERA 4

The results from the fourth iteration of the study looking at the third wave of the pandemic this winter have come back from the R factory, and we will be getting them into a publishable form and will be releasing it to you all. Watch this space.

Delphi

The Delphi study is in full-swing, and we are now rounding out the second round of the questionnaire, attempting to produce a list of research priorities. This will come out and will then go on to identify research priorities for the network. Stay tuned!

SHED

We are going ahead for a September / October start for SHED; we will be releasing a survey next week asking people to tell us where they will be next year in order to start working out where we will be recruiting for the sites. Keep an eye out!

Educational Work

With our new Education leads, Raj & Celestine, we've started producing more educational / research-orientated content on our home on RCEMLearning. This includes two new features - TERN's Top Papers and the TERN Virtual Journal Club.

TERN's Top Papers

Trainees do not always have time to read the most recent papers. We want to help trainees stay abreast of the evidence base. We have started by producing a monthly summary of important articles. Teams of trainees from each region (with the assistance of the TERN Education Leads) will produce a summary each month. These will be comprised of a selection of the most important articles to trainees based around that month’s theme published from the past year.

This summary will be written by trainees for trainees. Participation will help EM trainees evidence the research specialty learning outcome (SLO10) and will help aspiring EM trainees demonstrate commitment to specialty. If you are interested in getting involved email us at tern.education@rcem.ac.uk with your name, grade, and deanery.

TERN Virtual Journal Club

Now, as you will likely know, the new curriculum has removed the critical appraisal exam, moving towards a portfolio-process. We at TERN are keen to introduce evidence-based practice into our everyday working practice. The previous college focus on critical appraisal (by way of making it an exit examination) has meant that this has become the step of evidence-based practice we focus on. The most crucial of the five steps of evidence-based practice, and the one the literature suggests is the most neglected, is the actual application of the evidence to the patient in front of us.

We are planning to meet a number of needs through creating the Virtual Journal Club. Practically, trainees can demonstrate engagement with the new curriculum (and the SLO10 research outcome) and develop skills at appraising the evidence. We want to centre the application of evidence to clinical practice to the forefront of everyone's mind. Too long we look at a guideline and follow it blindly - we want to go behind the evidence, behind the guidelines, and really get to know the evidence-base behind our practice.

Find our articles on RCEMLearning - we'll also have a section where they will be linked to on this website.

This has been your TERN April Update!

Thanks,

Rob

by Robert Hirst

CERA 4 Update - First Week

CERA 4 Update time!

Many thanks for all your amazing efforts with CERA.

We have had 1945 responses which is a tremendous amount. A quirk that had not been anticipated last March (amongst other things, such as us even having to do this iteration of the survey...) had been the transition to an entirely different email set-up in Scotland. I very smartly* changed all of the bounced Scottish emails to nhs.scot which, amazingly, didn't fix the problem for everyone.

So, I'd like to extend sincere, heartfelt, big big thanks to Leia Kane and Rachel McLatchie who have painstakingly gone through their contact lists to update basically all of the bounced Scottish emails. The next round of updates will be going out to everyone tomorrow, which will hopefully give everyone a bit of time to have their say. There's the TERN equivalent of a Blue Peter badge waiting for them both if they want to claim it.

So, the moment you've been waiting for - the league table.

(Link available at www.datawrapper.de)

A little bit of backstage drama - realised that I had not cohered the two entries for Leicester, so they maintain a lead over the REMEDY team at Derby and Edd Carlton & Tom Roberts at Southmead. With a week to go there's still lots to play for, and I hope you'll be in your changing rooms, shouting about this study and offering those little orange wedges. Let's get those results in by the 11th and see who will reign supreme.

Thank you so much for your continued efforts & enthusiasm. TERN is contingent upon all your hard work.

Thanks again.

Rob

by Robert Hirst

CERA Is Online

CERA is online!

Good morning everyone, and many thanks for all your hard work with CERA - CERA is online. The study has gone live and the full preprint can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3760472. As you may have seen, the press release has been picked up by a few places. I'm going to share with you where you can find our work.

Press

These articles are directly about the findings of the CERA Study:

Guardian

Irish Examiner

and these articles reference the findings:

Metro
WalesOnline
Belfast Telegraph (paywalled)
Daily Mail (apologies. They don't even reference who did the study. Typical.)

Interview

Listen to Tom Roberts, former TERN Fellow, discussing the CERA study on LBC. It can be found on our new Soundcloud.

Infographic

You can find our infographic here. Let me know what you think!

Journal Club Facilitation

If you've got a Journal Club coming up or simply want a little more detail than the infographic but can't sit down to the paper, you can read the Journal Club facilitation document. If you want to run it as a journal club, instructions are found within the document. Big shout out to Laura Cottey & Leia Kane for their work on TIRED for 'inspiring' this format. The document is here.

Thank you again for all of your sterling efforts & enthusiasm. TERN is the result of all of your work & ardour.

Thank you.

Rob

by Robert Hirst

Merry Christmas from TERN

Good afternoon everyone,

It's been a long, tough year, for everyone. The global pandemic has tested us all and changed the fabric of society. Our behaviours have changed, our departments have changed, and our lives have changed. Most people will know someone who has sadly lost their life to this virus, or will have not seen someone they hold dear for many months now. The effects of the virus has highlighted inequality in our society, and we've seen it impact disproportionately on some more than others. The world (for the most part) feels like everything has been put on hold. The distribution of the first few vaccines holds some hope, but it'll be some time until we see anything approaching normal. The effects of this virus will last much longer than the time we remain locked-down for.

But, at this time of year, we can't help but look to the year ahead. A lot of research efforts have been diverted to COVID-19, and it has been really interesting seeing the scientific process in action. We've learnt so much about this virus, and despite the alarming news of a new viral variant, we know much more about treating this virus now. This has led to delays to other areas of research. We've had to delayed SHED twice now, and for the time being we aim to continue with SHED in February / March (depending upon your site). However, if anything changes you will of course hear about it from us.

In the meanwhile, we've received a number of applications for our new committee roles, who will help to expand TERN and the role it has in networking and education. We'll be introducing them in February once we've sifted through them and interviewed them.

Our Delphi process to investigate trainee research priorities continues. We have our participants, and will be distributing the initial questionnaire in the new year. We'll be posting about this and updating you as the process develops.

More imminently, we are hosting a session for the Trainees Research Engagement Day on the 14th January 2021. Our session will feature updates from Etimbuk Umana from Irish TERN on their National Emergency Resuscitation Airway Audit project, from Harriet Tucker from NATRIC on the TETRIS Project, and from me providing an update on TERN. It will be an excellent day and the programme is stuffed full of fantastic talks - you can check the programme here. It's £25 and will be an excellent day. Sign up here!

by Robert Hirst

Welcome to the TERNiverse!

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the new home of the Trainee Emergency Research Network. This website will be the place to find information on the network, find out about our studies, and retrieve protocols & study documents. This is not to say we are leaving RCEMLearning - we'll still be posting our monthly posts and featured articles on RCEMLearning.

We want to provide a space where we can discuss the network, answer frequently asked questions about our studies, and provide study-specific resources. For instance, when we start recruiting for SHED, this will be the place to find our site leaderboard. If you go to our entry for SHED, you can find our protocol and documents required to run the study.

This site will also function as a repository of information about our studies, with links to our presentations, publications, and provide an overview of each study. For an example of this, look at our entry for TIRED - the navigation bar at the top will take you there.

We've also included information about the network. A lot of the information here has been the basis for some decisions we've taken, but we've previously not had the space to discuss why we've made the decisions we have made. This site will allow us to be more transparent about the network and the decisions it makes. It is a trainee-centred network - it is important you know about the internal workings of it.

Please email me if you've got any questions, or if you'd like to throw praise our way. Most of the praise for the design should go to Nigel Taylor, who made a template so fool-proof that even I was able to produce these pages.

Cheers,

Rob

TERN Fellow

by Robert Hirst