LaChance Library: HEA 201: Evidence-Based Practice for Health Professions: Evidence-Based Practice

Evidence-Based Practice

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a problem-solving approach to the delivery of health care that integrates the best evidence from studies and patient care data with clinician expertise and patient preferences and values.

Levels of Evidence:

Publication Types that Demonstrate Evidence:

CASE STUDY: Observations on a single individual.

PRACTICE GUIDELINES: Care models developed by expert nursing researchers and validated by experts.

RANDOMIZED CONTROL TRIAL: An experiment in which two or more interventions, possibly including a control (or no) intervention, are compared by being randomly allocated to participants.

RESEARCH: An original, complete research study containing data collection, methodology, discussion of results, etc.

REVIEW: An article which summarizes a number of different studies and may draw conclusions about a particular intervention; an overview.

META-ANALYSIS: Uses statistical techniques in a systematic review to integrate the results of included studies.

META-SYNTHESIS: Articles that indicate the presence of a qualitative methodology that integrates results from a number of different, but inter-related studies.

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW: A review of a clearly formulated question that uses systematic and explicit methods to identify, select, and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review.

Evidence-based practice Toolkits:

Evidence Based Practice, Step by Step
The purpose of this 12-article series is to give nurses the knowledge and skills they need to implement EBP consistently, one step at a time. From the American Journal of Nursing.
University of Alberta: EBM Toolkit
This is a collection of tools for identifying, assessing and applying relevant evidence for better health care decision-making. The appraisal tools are adapted from the Users' Guides series prepared by the Evidence Based Medicine Working Group and originally published in JAMA.