A REALIST REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTIONS TO IMPROVE THE DELIVERY OF NUTRITION CARE BY FUTURE DOCTORS

Background: Dietary interventions are considered an important aspect of clinical practice, more so in the face of the rising prevalence of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases globally. Routinely, most doctors do not... [ view full abstract ]

Background: Dietary interventions are considered an important aspect of clinical practice, more so in the face of the rising prevalence of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases globally. Routinely, most doctors do not provide such intervention to their patients, and several barriers, present during both training and clinical practice, have been identified. Educational interventions to improve nutrition care competencies and delivery have been implemented, but with variable success. Due to the complex nature of educational interventions, undertaking systematic reviews only, is unable to provide appropriate lessons, hence the need to conduct a realist review. This realist review therefore aims to determine what sort educational interventions work, for whom, and in what circumstances, to improve the delivery of nutrition care by future doctors.
Methods: This realist review will be conducted according to Pawson’s five practical steps for conducting realist review: (1) clarifying the scope of the review, (2) determining the search strategy, including adopting broad inclusion/exclusion criteria and purposive snowballing techniques, (3) ensuring proper article selection and study quality assessment using multiple methods, (4) extracting and organising data through the process of note taking, annotation and conceptualization, and (5) synthesising the evidence and drawing conclusions through a process of reasoning.
Results: Findings will be reported according to the publication criteria outlined by the realist and meta-narrative evidence synthesis (RAMESES) group.
Conclusion: The key outcome of this realist review is the building and testing of a middle range theory of how educational interventions work, for whom and under what circumstances to improve the delivery of nutrition care. The findings of this review may be useful to teachers, students, researchers and policy/decision makers in health professions education and ultimately to patients in the long-term.