SQUIRE Blog

Back in the saddle—or in the saddle for the first time

Kathy Kirkland

Topic: Background Knowledge, Local problem, Intended improvement, Study question

How often do you get to use the excuse: I couldn't write because there was a pandemic?  Well, at least once, I guess.  I've been busy reading health alerts and implementing algorithms for testing and treating, and, in short, tracking the emergence of the new H1N1 influenza in the US and even right here in New Hampshire.  Now that things have reached some degree of equilibrium, I turned back today to my hand hygiene improvement paper, and actually wrote an introduction.

I found the Squire guidelines helpful in that they laid out what was necessary.  In the past I tend to go on and on in an introduction--after all, the background in some ways is what you know best when you've done a project like this.  But the guidelines reminded me to stick to the key points--the introduction should be just enough to explain why you did the work in the first place--if people want to read more detail, they can go to the references and read it there.  Which reminds me of a problem I have writing introductions: I never can just pull out of my head the exact reference for what I want to include.  I know when I write a sentence that needs a reference, so I just write in a placeholder [REF]--then later I have the tedious job of going back and trying to figure out where the concept originated.  Do other people have that problem?  I've always felt it as a failure of my scholarship that I don't have all this organized in my mind.

I spent about half an hour writing and was able to get down on paper (without references) the basic #3-6 within introduction: Background Knowledge, Local Problem, Intended Improvement, and, I guess, Study Question.  I say I guess because I'm not clear on the question, or have not yet quite framed it as a question.  "Is it possible to improve hand hygiene?" "Is it possible to achieve sustained high levels of hand hygiene?" "Do these interventions work?" "Were all these components necessary?"

Maybe I need to spend some time thinking more about the questions.  OR maybe after I write some of the rest of the paper, the questions will become clear, and I will go back and revise this part.