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HIP202 Research Skills Guide: Evidence-Based practice

In this section

Evidence-Based Practice, as it applies to health and medicine, can be described as the process of integrating the best available research evidence with clinical expertise, the patient's values and expectations, and the context of the practice or environment in which this is taking place.

It is usually seen as consisting of five steps: Ask, Acquire, Appraise, Apply, and Assess/Audit.

This section introduces you the first two steps of the process which are the focus of the learning in HIP202:

  • Ask - expressing the problem as a clinical question (Ask the question)
  • Acquire - finding evidence-based resources that answer the question (Acquire the evidence)

There are numerous online resources available on Evidence-Based Practice. In particular, CSU Library has its own library guide on Evidence-Based Practice. 

In this section, we will concentrate on:

The following several sections of this guide deal with Step Two: Acquire.

Evidence-Based practice

Evidence-based practice is the intersection of clinical expertise, research evidence, information from the practice context, and the patients values and circumstances

Hoffmann, T., Bennett, S., & Mar, C. D. (2016). Evidence-based practice across the health professions (3rd ed.). Chatswood, Australia: Elsevier Australia.

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