Effectiveness of technology-enhanced simulation in teaching digital rectal examination: a systematic review narrative synthesis

Background The Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MERSQI) is widely used to appraise the methodological quality of medical education studies. However, the MERSQI lacks some criteria which could facilitate better quality assessment. The objective of this study is to achieve consensus among experts on: (1) the MERSQI scoring system and the relative importance of each domain (2) modifications of the MERSQI. Method A modified Delphi technique was used to achieve consensus among experts in the field of medical education. The initial item pool contained all items from MERSQI and items added in our previous published work. Each Delphi round comprised a questionnaire and, after the first iteration, an analysis and feedback report. We modified the quality instruments’ domains, items and sub-items and re-scored items/domains based on the Delphi panel feedback. Results A total of 12 experts agreed to participate and were sent the first and second-round questionnaires. First round: 12 returned of which 11 contained analysable responses; second-round: 10 returned analysable responses. We started with seven domains with an initial item pool of 12 items and 38 sub-items. No change in the number of domains or items resulted from the Delphi process; however, the number of sub-items increased from 38 to 43 across the two Delphi rounds. In Delphi-2: eight respondents gave ‘study design’ the highest weighting while ‘setting’ was given the lowest weighting by all respondents. There was no change in the domains’ average weighting score and ranks between rounds. Conclusions The final criteria list and the new domain weighting score of the Modified MERSQI (MMERSQI) was satisfactory to all respondents. We suggest that the MMERSQI, in building on the success of the MERSQI, may help further establish a reference standard of quality measures for many medical education studies.

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“…A group of respondents with known relevant expertise [11] change in rank? 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 consensus on MMERSQI.…”

Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We included the initial pool of MERSQI items and included new items (Table 1) which we had developed in our previous work [11] to improve the granularity of the MERSQI. Based on the first modified MERSQI list, we created a Delphi questionnaire of 12 items under seven domains i.e.…”

Section: Selection Of Itemsmentioning

confidence: 99%