Mental health conditions are the bread and butter of primary care. Depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder. They walk through the door every single day. And yet, study after study tells us the same thing: primary care practitioners are underdiagnosing them. Not because they don't care, but because the training hasn't kept up.
So here's the question I've been sitting with all summer: if you put the right educational tool online, could you actually close that gap?
We're looking at online educational interventions designed to improve how primary care and community practitioners diagnose mental health disorders. Think e-learning modules, interactive virtual scenarios, web-based training. The kind of tools that can scale in ways a weekend workshop never could.
Our review covers RCTs, quasi-experimental studies, and cohort studies published from 2010 onwards, drawn from four major databases. We're measuring what matters: diagnostic accuracy, confidence in diagnosis, diagnostic knowledge, sensitivity and specificity.
The goal isn't just academic. The findings will directly inform a new case on UCL's eCREST, an online diagnostic training tool. So the evidence we synthesise here has a real destination.
What's surprised me most so far is how much of this work happens before you ever read a single paper. Rerunning a search strategy, validating it, running sensitivity checks, catching the places where your net has holes. Systematic reviewing is slow, meticulous, and honestly kind of humbling. The methodology is the contribution.