Study | Quality Criteria | Risk of Bias | Notes |
Aggar 2019 [20] | Was the study question or objective clearly stated? | No |
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Were eligibility/selection criteria for the study population prespecified and clearly described? | No |
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Were the participants in the study representative of those who would be eligible for the test/service/intervention in the general or clinical population of interest? | No |
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Were all eligible participants that met the prespecified entry criteria enrolled? | Not reported |
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Was the sample size sufficiently large to provide confidence in the findings? | Yes | The authors state that the small sample size was a limitation, and was likely to impact on external validity, power and generalisability. | |
Was the test/service/intervention clearly described and delivered consistently across the study population? | No |
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Were the outcome measures prespecified, clearly defined, valid, reliable, and assessed consistently across all study participants? | No |
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Were the people assessing the outcomes blinded to the participants’ exposures/interventions? | Yes |
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Was the loss to follow-up after baseline 20% or less? Were those lost to follow-up accounted for in the analysis? | Yes | 45% of participants were lost to follow-up. Those lost to follow-up don’t seem to have been accounted for in the study. | |
Did the statistical methods examine changes in outcome measures from before to after the intervention? Were statistical tests done that provided p values for the pre-to-post changes? | No |
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Were outcome measures of interest taken multiple times before the intervention and multiple times after the intervention (i.e., did they use an interrupted time-series design)? | Yes | Outcome measures were only taken once at pre and post intervention. | |
If the intervention was conducted at a group level (e.g., a whole hospital, a community, etc.) did the statistical analysis take into account the use of individual-level data to determine effects at the group level? | Yes |
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