Pain relief for palliative cancer patients
What does best practice care for musculoskeletal pain look like?
After you have clearly stated your research question you can go on to identify your PICO/PICo terms, Synonyms and your search strategy. You can use tables and include a brief explanation of this, referring to those tables.
This should be followed by your inclusion/exclusion criteria. A PRISMA diagram may help explain your search results as well. That would make it clear about how you arrived at the papers you included in your review.
The reader (examiner) needs to be able to determine if the papers you have identified are relevant to your question and whether your search strategy is constructed well enough to have picked up all the relevant literature.
Thematic analysis and critical appraisal
The next section is your thematic analysis and critical appraisal of the papers. It would help to understand this section with an introduction explaining, briefly, what the themes you identified are, what methodologies the authors have used and how the papers rank in terms of the evidence hierarchy. Have a look at the example to see how others have structured theirs and how they have used tables to illustrate their analysis.
Your thematic analysis is very descriptive. The aim of this section should be for you to explain how all of your papers address each of your themes, comparing and contrasting accounts and identifying how well or otherwise the themes are covered.
Are there any gaps in knowledge, for instance. As it is, you appear to have provided a depth description of each theme using one paper for each theme.
You clearly know your subject, but it is important that you draw the papers together and analyse them together into your themes. The same should go for the critical appraisal.
Your draft is incomplete, as you note. Still to come is the critical appraisal. Be careful to use the right critical appraisal tool for the right methodology, ie use the qualitative CASP tool for qualitative papers, the RCT one for papers if they used RCTs and so on.
Have attached the original assignment done by you guys which needs improvements listed above, most areas needing improving? adding have highlighted in yellow.
