Education for primary care : an official publication of the Association of Course Organisers, National Association of GP Tutors, World Organisation of Family Doctors, 2012
We read with interest the paper by Mugweni et al1 published in the November issue of Education fo... more We read with interest the paper by Mugweni et al1 published in the November issue of Education for Primary Care. A review of the literature on appraisal is timely, with the imminent introduction of revalidation and raised awareness concerning the nature and purpose of appraisal. We were, however, disappointed that the authors seemed to have missed an opportunity to undertake a much-needed critical and comprehensive look at the literature. Instead, they chose to focus only on the perceived benefits, leading to a narrow and selective view of what can be learned from the literature. In our opinion, their approach pays too much attention to the ‘noise’ of a limited number of papers, overstating the conclusions to be drawn as a consequence, and misses the ‘signal’ of those excluded.2 As the authors themselves note: ‘purposive sampling may be prone to selection bias’ (2011, p.394).1 We would like to raise three concerns in particular. First, in setting out the method, the authors do not m...
Uploads
Papers by Rachel Locke