Welcome to Research Methods and Evidence-based Practice (EBP). This section aims to develop your understanding of the concepts of research and evidence-based practice.
Play the video to find out what EBP is.
Definitions of evidence-based practice
Evidence-based practice is about making better decisions in our clinical practice. Instead of thinking we know the most effective way of providing care for someone, the evidence-based practice process helps us to focus on understanding what evidence tells us about what is the most effective way.
One definition of evidence-based practice puts it this way:
“Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a problem-solving approach to clinical care that incorporates the conscientious use of current best evidence from well-designed studies, a clinician’s expertise, and patient values and preferences” (Fineout-Overholt et al, 2005). Copy of this paper is in the week 1 folder.
Another way of thinking about evidence-based practice is that it is an approach to solving the problems that you might encounter in your clinical practice. Evidence-based practice brings together information from different sources to answer burning clinical questions.
Explore the animation below for further information about the different sources of evidence.
So the aim of evidence-based practice is to solve problems, make better decisions, and thereby improve outcomes for the people we care for in our clinical practice by knowing how to find good quality evidence, for example from research or research-based guidelines, and combining this with our own (or our colleagues’) clinical expertise, and our knowledge of the preferences and values of the people we are caring for. This can be set out as the evidence-based practice process. Explore this process using the animation below, once you have completed the first run through you will be able to go back to each step at will.
The beginning of evidence-based practice can be traced to pioneers such as Prof. Archie Cochrane (1909-1988). Archie Cochrane was a physician who specialised in chest diseases and tuberculosis. During the Second World War, while acting as medical officer in POW camps, he was responsible for treating prisoners suffering from TB. After the war, thinking back on his experiences, he came to the conclusion that he hadn’t really known whether the treatments he was providing had helped his patients or made them worse: he had no evidence of the effectiveness of the different treatments to guide his decisions. This lead him to believe that in health care we need a way of accessing relevant randomised controlled trials (a form of research that is designed to assess the effectiveness of different treatments or other forms of care) to help us know if the health care we provide for people actually works or not.
Today, we can all access the Cochrane Collaboration, which is a constantly updated collection of good quality, health related evidence from our computers.
So how does EBP get applied to change clinical practice? Watch the video for an example.