Healthcare Research Questions

"Does the value of pain change on the Visual Analog Pain Scale (VAS) between before and after treatment?" carries its instrument in the wording. It does not ask whether pain got better, it asks whether a named score moves between two named time points, so there is no arguing later about what improvement meant. Pain, function and quality of life each have several validated scales, and they do not always agree, which is why naming yours is not a formality. An ethics board and an examiner will both usually want to know what counted as the outcome, and a question written this way has already told them.

Decide whether your question is about patients, about the people delivering the care, or about how the service is organized, because that decision settles your sampling plan. A lot of completed healthcare research is not about a disease at all: how physicians in Ontario reach a treatment decision, what pediatricians weigh when a decision is hard, how respiratory therapists see their own counseling practice. Clinicians are also far easier to reach than a clinical sample. Name the unit in the question and the rest of the method follows from it.

A reference standard, named in the question. Asking for the sensitivity and specificity of three clinical tests, singly and as a battery, against an ultrasound measure as the reference tells a reader what accuracy is being measured against. Without that comparison you cannot say a test is accurate, only that it produced a result. Naming the battery as well as the individual tests declares a second analysis up front, which is cheaper than explaining in your defense why you ran it.

As many as you can still recruit for. A question that narrows to African American men who live alone and who use one named Medicaid program stacks three conditions on one population, which is tight enough for an examiner to judge whether the sample matched. The risk is not that a narrow population looks unambitious, it is that the last condition takes your eligible pool down to nine people. Count the eligible cases at your site before the question is fixed, not after.

Because each outcome gets its own question. A study with three outcomes will often ask three sentences, each answerable on its own, rather than folding them into one long question that no single analysis could handle. A short question is not a thin one if the set around it does the work. It also hands you your results chapter in the order you will write it.

It can, if every clause is doing work. A question that lists each predictor, names a credentialing exam as the outcome and holds the sample to one kind of college in one region is long, and you can still tell what will be regressed on what before the sentence ends. Length is only a problem when it comes from hedging, or from two questions stuck together with an and. Read it aloud and cut any phrase you could delete without changing what you have to go and measure.

With approval, and usually only in de-identified form. Retrospective chart review is the route most often granted, and whether consent can be waived is the board's call rather than yours. In the US a board may waive HIPAA authorization only where the privacy risk is minimal and the study could not practicably be done without those records, so write the argument for both into the application. The record custodian's permission is separate from ethics approval, and the rules differ by country, so ask your own site what it wants before you plan around the data.

If you are prospectively assigning people to an intervention, yes. Journals following the ICMJE recommendations require registration in a public registry at or before the first participant consents, and they do not accept a trial registered afterward, so it is not something you can tidy up later. Observational work, chart reviews and interview studies fall outside that requirement. Your ethics board will usually tell you which side you are on, and it costs nothing to ask rather than assume.

Yes, though it usually runs slower than the clinic's headline numbers suggest, and the first gatekeeper is a clinician rather than the patient. A named local collaborator who can vouch for you is what tends to unlock it. If recruitment is your main risk, keep a version of the question that runs on existing data in reserve.

Not for all of it. Completed healthcare dissertations have been written by chaplains, music therapists, dentists and medical educators, and a lot of health services research asks how care is organized rather than what a disease does. What you do need is an advisor or collaborator who knows the setting well enough to stop you designing something clinically naive.

With a power calculation built on an effect size from a published study in the same area, not on a number that felt reasonable. Boards tend to ask because a study that recruits more patients than the question needs exposes people for nothing, and one that recruits too few wastes everyone's time. If there is no effect size to build on, say so and propose the work as a pilot with a stated stopping point.