10 years of CIDI Clinical Instruments for Evaluating Health – Development, Evaluation and Implementation
CIDI was developed based on the long-lasting tradition and in the need for structured education for developing, selecting and evaluating suitable instruments for the measurement of health issues or related to the individuals as patients, their families, environment and service and health education systems. Ten years ago an analysis into the www pages of universities and their education about methodology for early career researchers did not include similar course.
The CIDI course is based on nursing science and related fields of sciences, and the focus is on instrumentation and measurement in research and/or clinical practice. The main responsible teacher is professor Riitta Suhonen. She has been the responsible scientist of the course from the beginning, since 2011 and shares currently the responsibility with docent Minna Stolt. Joined are also all skilled nurse researchers who have shown strong motivation in developing research instruments using a variety of techniques, and statistical and other methods. Also those who participated in the course in the beginning years and have developed their instruments have joined in the teaching staff of CIDI. Current teachers in CIDI are researchers from the Department of Nursing Science and Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
The course totals 25 ECTS, and includes 3 modules. Teaching methods are lectures, guided workshops, independent reading and working with own instrumentation, and seminars. The course has been constructed so that there is one contact week, and other teaching is virtual using the Moodle platform, and is conducted from January to May each year. The course ends for interactive seminars in May. Each course participant works with given material in workshops and then independent work is focused on each own instrumentation including instruments and measurement techniques in research. In addition, research plan or implementation plan of the instrument in practice are created as an outcome of the course.
CIDI course has been attractive for PhD candidates, but also for other early career researchers including master students and advance practice nurses from the University of Turku, other Finnish universities and healthcare organisations. The CIDI is currently well known internationally, and participants from approximately 20 European countries have participated in and carried out the course during the 10 years. Internationality has provided an excellent starting point to analyse instruments in different cultures and languages.
The course has been well accepted with good feedback, and the participants have given the strong motivation for the teachers to continue the course. The best feedback is to read theses or witness PhD candidates reporting their processes of instrumentation and instrument development while graduating. The structures, teaching methods and electronic platforms are offering high level education that can be tailored according to each participant’s schedules and serve their current research initiatives.
There are plenty of interesting topics to investigate in nursing science and related scientific fields. Therefore, courses of instruments, measurement and research methodology, not to forget the strong theoretical basis is needed also in the future. This is offering the tools for developing theory in science too.
Next CIDI course module 1 will start on 4 January 2021. Application deadline will be in the beginning of December 2020.
