STEPS OF Evidence-Based Practice
Healthcare providers of today and tomorrow must understand and apply the concepts of Evidence-Based Practice (EBP)/Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) to cope with the current state of healthcare. The basic concept of EBP is simple -- use the best available information to take care of patients. Yet, mastery of all the skills necessary to practice EBP is difficult.
Evidence Based Practice Tutorial Series © 2019 from Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Evidence-Based Practice: Improving Patient Care from University of California, Irvine, Grunigen Library
Evidence-Based Medicine Tutorials from University of Massachusetts Medical School, Lamar Soutter Library
Whether you call it EBP (Practice), EBM (Medicine) or something else (e.g., EBN for Nursing, EBHC for Health Care), the principles are the same. Depending on your field of healthcare, the specific steps below might be slightly different. For this Library Guide we will use EBP to mean all of the above.
DEFINITIONS vary:
EBP is "the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external evidence from systematic research."
--Sackett, D.L., Rosenberg, W.C., and Gray, J.A.M. (1996). Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn't. BMJ, 312, 71-72.
“Evidence-based medicine is the use of mathematical estimates of the risk of benefit and harm, derived from high-quality research on population samples, to inform clinical decision making in the diagnosis, investigation or management of individual patients.
--Greenhalgh, T. (2006). How to read a paper: the basics of evidence-based medicine (3rd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 12.
“EBM encourages a healthy skepticism of every practice in medicine and promotes a culture of inquiry.”
--Sloane, P.D., Slatt, L.M., Ebell, M.H., Jacques, L.B., Smith, M.A. (2008). Essentials of family medicine (5th ed.). Philadelphia: Wolters, pp. 40.