Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) is a problem-solving approach to clinical decision-making within health care. It integrates the best available scientific evidence with the best available experiential patient and practitioner evidence. EBP considers internal and external influences on practice and encourages critical thinking.
"Implementing evidence in clinical practice is a process of closing the gap between research and practice so that research findings are used more routinely. This process is crucial to promote the efficacy, efficiency, and justification of reimbursement/funding of OT services necessary to maintain our position as a valued member within the future of healthcare" (OT Seeker, n.d.).
On this page you will find resources to help you apply EBP principles to your research. Find resources including systematic reviews, critically appraised topics and articles, and practice guidelines.
First you need to define a problem and formulate a clinical question. In the research process, this is the research question or statement. In the clinical setting, ‘asking a question’ may become part of a research study, a quality improvement project, or lead to evidence-based practice.
A commonly used format for creating a clinical question is known as PICO or PICO(T), which refers to: Patient/Problem, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome and occasionally Timeframe/Type of Study.
Most common type of clinical questions: Therapy, Diagnosis, Harm, Prognosis
| Therapy | determining the effect of interventions on patient-important outcomes | |
| Diagnosis | establishing the power of a test to differentiate between those with and without a target condition or disease | |
| Etiology/Harm |
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| Prognosis |
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You have a patient who has difficulty exercising due to COPD and you wonder if pursed lip breathing techniques may improve their endurance.
P = patients with COPD
I = pursed lip breathing
C = regular breathing
O = improved exercise endurance
Clinical Question: In patients with COPD, does using pursed lip breathing, as compared to regular breathing, improve exercise endurance?
You are working with a recent stroke patient who is having balance issues and you are considering using virtual reality in their therapy.
P = recent stroke, balance issues
I = virtual reality
C = no virtual reality
O = improved balance
Clinical Question: In recent stroke patients, how does using virtual reality affect or improve balance?
Search strings are constructed searches that combine concepts with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT). You can start building a search string by using keywords from your list of PICO terms and synonyms or related terms of them and then move to established subject terms that databases use to tag item records.
The following databases are ideal for finding evidence-based literature:
Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews – contains full-text articles and protocols focusing on the effects of healthcare.
OT Seeker is a database of abstracts of systematic reviews and randomized controlled trials relevant to occupational therapy. Trials have been critically appraised and rated to assist therapists to evaluate their validity.
Depending on your research question, you need to address what type of study would provide the best evidence. When searching for articles, databases often have filters allowing you to acquire specific types of studies.
Systematic Review: It is an intensive review of the literature on a given topic. It uses explicit and rigorous methods to identify the studies included in the review. It also critically appraises and synthesizes all the studies included in the review. - secondary research
Meta-Analysis: Similarly to a systematic they overview extensively the literature on a topic, but they combine the results of all the studies identified in a quantitative way. They synthesizing summaries and make a conclusion that may be used to evaluate therapeutic effectiveness. - secondary research
Randomized Controlled Trial: It is a clinical trial that involves at least one test treatment and one control treatment. There was concurrent enrollment and follows up of the test- and control-treated groups, and in which the treatments were administered by a random process.- primary research
Cohort Study: A study in which subsets of a defined population are identified and studies over a period of time to see the effects of something. - primary research
Cross-sectional Study: A study that describes the relationship between diseases and other factors at one point in time in a defined population. They are often used for comparing diagnostic test.
Retrospective Cohort: A study that follows the same direction of inquiry as a cohort study, but this study design uses information that has been already collected in the past and kept in files or data sets.
Case Control Study: A study that starts with the identification of persons with a specific condition then compared with a control group who do not have the condition. The relationship of an attribute to the disease is examined by comparing often relying on medical records of and patient recall for data collection. Documenting the frequency or levels of the attribute in each group. These type of studies are often less reliable because showing a statistical significance is harder. - primary research
Case Series / Reports: Articles written about one patient or a series of patients with the same issue. Great for rare diseases, disorders, and drug/treatment reactions. Not the best source of evidence because it focuses on a small group of people, but sometimes it's the only source.
Uses words to describe human behaviors. It answers a wide variety of questions related to human responses to actual or potential health problems. The purpose of qualitative research is to describe, explore and explain the health-related phenomena being studied.
Uses numbers to obtain precise measurements that can later be statistically analyzed. Many quantitative studies test hypotheses. It follows a systematic, subjective approach to examine the relationship between variables with the primary goal being to analyze and represent that relationship mathematically through statistical analysis. This is the type of research approach most commonly used in scientific research problems.
When reading articles and determining which studies to use, have in mind the American Occupational Therapy Association levels and strength of evidence.
Source: American Occupational Therapy Association. Levels and strength of evidence.
When you click on the title of a specific article, most databases re-direct you to the item record, where you can see the bibliographic information, abstract of the article, and options to save or cite. The abstract is a short description of the article; it is always recommended to read it to determine if you want it. You must click the Full-Text link within the database to read or download the full article. The Full-Text might be in PDF or HTML format.
Full Text = Full Article
