4: What We Know About Clinical Leadership

There is extensive academic research on clinical leadership and analysis of its implications from different perspectives. The vast material contained in databases and scientific journals poses a challenge for systematic review. Searching the databases or Google Scholar without a research strategy is both unfruitful and unreliable. For this reason, efforts to rationalise research strategies in health policy are required for the evaluation of findings from multiple disciplines and methodologies. Accordingly, for our systematic review we applied the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic review and Meta-Analysis) method to search the PubMed database using ‘clinical leadership’ as search terms.

PRISMA provides a minimal standard procedure to report a systematic review of randomised trials. Before illustrating the technical nature of the methodology, we present the basics of a systematic review and a meta-analysis.