Evidence Based Practice (EBP) is a process of “integrating the best available research evidence with clinical expertise and the patient’s unique values and circumstances” (Straus, Glasziou, Richardson, & Haynes, 2011).

And "it also requires the health professional to consider characteristics of the practice context in which they work." (Hoffman, Bennett, & Del Mar, 2017).

• The best research evidence is usually from relevant research that has been carried out using sound methodology.
   
• Clinical expertise is a combination of the clinician’s experience, education, and clinical skills.
   
• The patient has his/her own personal preferences, concerns, expectations, and values.
   
• The practice context includes characteristics of the situation in which the interaction between patient and health professional is taking place.

Evidence-Based Practice has been expanded from Evidence-Based Medicine to apply to other health professions and other disciplines. This guide concentrates on (but is not exclusive to) EBP as it applies to the health professions.

Evidence-Based Practice vs Evidence-Informed Practice

A term that is sometimes used, especially in nursing research, is Evidence-Informed Practice. According to Woodbury and Kuhnke (2014), this term is used instead of, or as well as, Evidence-Based Practice. They suggest that the term gives more flexibility regarding the nature of evidence and its use; that is, the term "implies that many different levels of evidence and types of evidence … are needed and used to support decisions in clinical practice.” (p. 29)

Hoffmann, T., Bennett, S., & Del Mar, C. (2024). Evidence-based practice across the health professions (4th ed.). Elsevier.

Straus, S. E., Glasziou, P., Richardson, W. S., & Haynes, R. B. (2019). Evidence-based medicine: How to practice and teach EBM (5th ed.).  Elsevier.

Woodbury, M. G., & Kuhnke, J. L. (2014). Evidence-based practice vs. evidence-informed practice: What's the difference? Wound Care Canada, 12(1), 26-29.

Evidence-Based Practice is usually seen as having five steps:

Hoffman, Bennett, and Del Mar point out that Evidence-Based Practice is not the same as, or limited to, randomised controlled trials:

"... it is certainly true that randomised controlled trials are the cornerstone of research investigating whether interventions (treatments) work. However, questions about the effectiveness of interventions are not the only type of clinical question ." (Hoffman, Bennett, & Del Mar, 2017).

Health professionals also need information about questions of:

• aetiology - what causes disease
• frequency - how often a disease or condition occurs
• diagnosis - how we know if a client has a disease or condition
• prognosis - what happens to a patient with a condition over time
• the client's experiences and concerns.

It's possible that each question will require a different type of research design, and randomised controlled trials are just one type of research design. Others include:

• qualitative research
• case controlled studies
• cross-sectional studies
• cohort studies.

Hoffmann, T., Bennett, S., & Del Mar, C. (2024). Evidence-based practice across the health professions (4th ed.). Elsevier Australia.

Tutorials

• Using PubMed in Evidence-Based Practice 
  A training course on how to use evidence-based practice when searching clinical questions using PubMed.  Compiled by the National Library of Medicine.
• EBP Module One: Intro to EBP
  Module One of a online tutorial compiled by the Duke University Medical Center Library and the University of Carolina Health Sciences Library.

Website

• Evidence Essentials
  An introduction to Evidence Based Medicine, clinical trials, and Cochrane evidence, from the respected Cochrane Collaboration. Designed for consumers, policy-makers, and healthcare professionals. Free, but you need to register.

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