Primary Health Care Research - Science topic

A priori power analysis is intended to avoid studies that can't address their primary question or studies that waste precious resources by being larger than they need to be. They also force you to define your primary question and think about clinically meaningful effect sizes. In that sense, I regard them as mandatory. As a result, I tend to reject grants or papers sent to me for review that don't include a sample size calculation. That said,  most statisticians eschew a posteriori power calculations, since once the study is done, you either saw the effect or didn't. For the latter, it's a matter of taste and philosophy.

And your question is....?

You can survey both the employees to assess their knowledge and their supervisors to assess their job performance.  The two would need to be linked.

You may also be able to survey the employees about their knowledge and use performance evaluations from their personnel records (if these exist).  Again the two need to be linked.

Thirdly you could survey the employees to assess knowledge and survey their patients to assess job performance.  In addition to patients or instead of patients you could also survey their support staff (nurses, medical assistants, receptionists) to assess their performance.

This article may help

Hibbard JH, Collins PA, Mahoney E, Baker LH. The development and testing of a measure assessing clinician beliefs about patient self-management. Health Expect. 2009;13:65–72.

I am working in preventive health care. I need to write a journal article. I have no stats skills myself or in any team member.

Interesting discussion thread! Thanks David, for sharing the New Zealand work. There is another article from Canada that may be of interest:

ELIAS B, Mignone J, Hall M, Hong S, Hart L, Sareen J, (2012) Trauma and suicide behaviour histories among a Canadian indigenous population: An empirical exploration of the potential role of Canada’s residential school system, Social Science and Medicine 74:1560-1569.

Brenda Elias, the lead author is also on Research Gate and this article is available on her page as a download. Folks associated with the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy have been doing some really interesting population level quantitative work so there may be more I am not aware of. 

Our team here in Saskatchewan is just completing a paper looking at associations between measures of colonization, such as Residential School attendance and health outcomes such as diabetes and respiratory health (lung function, asthma) in two First Nation communities. We also have measures of individual experiences of racism  (as opposed to structural and systemic) that we have looked at in association with diabetes. We are seeing some interesting relationships which I would be happy to share once we are at that stage (the paper is currently under review by community partners). Not terribly helpful for your current review -but perhaps in the future?

Finally -at the framework level, the Assembly of First Nations in Canada has produced a First Nation Health Reporting Framework  (http://health.afn.ca/uploads/files/sdoh_afn.pdf) that explicitly locates self-determination and the effects of colonization among its social determinants of health. See also here: http://health.afn.ca/en/about-us/pro/social-determinants-of-health. This is in contrast to the Public Health Agency of Canada, which recognizes nothing like this, and has only listed gender and culture since 1999. These frameworks are important, of course, because they drive what is ultimately measured.

On the topic of frameworks, the Manitoba Metis Federation has produced a really interesting wellness framework as their lens for looking at the health status of the Manitoba Metis population. Chapter 2 of this report: http://www.mmf.mb.ca/docs/MCHP-Metis_Health_Status_Full_Report_(WEB)_(update_aug11_2011).pdf provides a really interesting discussion of how they got there and why their framework  looks as it does (it does not name colonization explicitly but does refer to governance), and how it has been applied.

Hope some of this is useful. Sylvia