The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP)

Everyone wants good health and wellbeing, and healthcare that is effective. But how can we know whether the claims made for an intervention are valid? Some interventions are given with the best of intentions but have later been found to be ineffective with the potential for harm and wasted resources.

Critical appraisal skills enable you to systematically assess the trustworthiness and relevance of results in published research. The Critical Appraisals Skills Programme (CASP) has 29 years of expertise in the delivery of training and skills development to healthcare and other professionals.

The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) was developed in Oxford in 1993. Over the years, it has contributed to increasing the knowledge and developing skills of health professionals in the use of evidence-based approaches to health and social care in the UK. CASP workshops and resources help participants put knowledge into practice by learning how to formulate questions systematically, to find research evidence, to appraise research evidence, and to act on what they find. CASP offers critical appraisal skills training, workshops, and tools. These help you evaluate health and care related research for trustworthiness, results, and relevance.

What does CASP offer

• Face to Face CASP Workshops
• Virtual CASP Workshops
• Online Learning
• Train the Trainer Courses: Developing teaching skills

The CASP approach

We approach research in 3 steps:

Is the study valid?

The first step is to decide whether the study was unbiased by evaluating its methodological quality. Different criteria for validity of articles are used for different types of questions on; treatment, diagnosis, prognosis and economic evaluation. Depending on the validity of an article we can classify it within a scale of levels of evidence and degrees of recommendation.

What are the results?

If we decide that the study is valid, we can go on to look at the results. At this step we consider whether the study’s results are clinically important. For example, did the experimental group show a significantly better outcome compared with the control group? We also consider how much uncertainty there is about the results, as expressed in the form of p values, confidence intervals and sensitivity analysis.

Are the results useful?

Once you have decided that your evidence is valid and important, you need to think about how it applies to your question. It is likely, for example, that your patient or population may have different characteristics to those in the study. Critical appraisal skills provide a framework within which to consider these issues in an explicit, transparent way.

Our Philosophy

The philosophy of CASP has always been about sharing knowledge and understanding, working in ways that are non-hierarchical, multidisciplinary, and using problem-based approaches. This ensures that it is accessible and has practical day to day application.