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Evidence-Based Practice: Step 1: Ask

An introduction to Evidence-Based Practice, based on the five steps

Step 1: Ask the question

The first step in the evidence-based practice process is to formulate a clinical question.

The clinical question should be relevant to the patient or the problem and constructed so as to help you search for an answer.

There are tools that help make this process easier. These "mnemonics" or "frameworks" help you to:

  • put together the parts of the clinical question
  • identify the key concepts that need to be in articles that will help answer the question
  • formulate your search strategy.

These mnemonics include PICO and SPIDER, and the lesser-used PEO, SPICE, and ECLIPSE.

In evidence-based healthcare, there can be different types of questions:

  • Therapy/Intervention
  • Diagnosis/Screening
  • Prognosis
  • Aetiology/Causation
  • Prevention

(See Question types and study types for more information on these question types in relation to study types.)

This section covers:

  • PICO and SPIDER
  • More Resources on Asking the Clinical Question.
Subjects: Research Support

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