What is a qualitative synthesis?

If you want to inform your practice with answers to questions such as ‘What is it like for people to suffer chronic pain?’ or ‘What are patients’ understanding and experience of hypertension and taking medication’1 or ‘What are older people's views about falling and taking part in a falls programme’2 then what might you do? You could read individual research papers, but often there are many papers and they can be difficult to track down and access. A qualitative synthesis (sometimes called a qualitative systematic review) systematically searches for research on a topic, and draws the findings from individual studies together. Although systematic …