Evidence-based practice (EBP) is an approach to health care wherein health professionals use the best evidence possible, i.e. the most appropriate information available, to make clinical decisions for individual patients....It involves complex and conscientious decision-making based not only on the available evidence but also on patient characteristics, situations, and preferences. It recognized that health care is individualized and ever changing and involves uncertainties and probabilities.
McKibbon KA. Evidence-based practice. Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1998 Jul;86(3):396-401.
EBP combines nursing expertise, patient preference, and peer-reviewed literature
These are the good EBP Nursing research resources for evidence based summaries and guidelines avaialble freely on the Internet:
There are five elements to consider when developing a good clinical research question:
| P | I | C | O | T |
| Patient or Problem |
Intervention | Comparison Intervention | Outcome | Time |
| Describe as accurately as possible the patient or group of patients of interest |
What is the main intervention or therapy you wish to consider? |
Is there an alternative treatment to compare? | What is the clincial outcome? | Time it takes to demonstrate a clinical outcome. |
These are the best EBP Nursing research resources for literature reviews, systematic reviews and evidence based summaries available through AU's subscription library databases:
Rating System for the Hierarchy of Evidence/Levels of Evidence
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Level I
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Evidence for a systematic review or meta-analysis of all relevant RCTs or evidence-based clinical practice guidelines based on systematic reviews of RCTs.
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Level II
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Evidence obtained from at least one well-designed RCT.
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Level III
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Evidence obtained from one well-designed controlled trials without Randomization. |
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Level IV
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Evidence from well-designed case-control and cohort studies.
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Level V
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Evidence from systematic reviews of descriptive or qualitative study.
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Level VI
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Evidence from single descriptive or qualitative study.
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Level VII
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Evidence from the opinion of authorities and/or reports of expert committees. |
* Table from Melnyk, Bernadette Mazurek and Ellen Fineout-Overholt. Evidence-based practice in nursing and healthcare. Philadelphia : Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2005:10.
CINAHL
There are tutorials on using CINAHL and MeSH headings, a basic searching, and advanced searching.
PubMed Quick Tours
A collection of brief animated tutorials with audio for using PubMed. Topics include PubMed Simple Search, Searching the MeSH Database, and others. This is also a link to a comprehensive PubMed tutorial.
A big "thank you" to Sonoma State Libraries for sharing this information from their Research Guide!
A Literature Review is a scholarly analysis of a body of research about a specific issue or topic. (See Lit Review tab for more info.)
A Meta-Analysis is a statistical technique for combining the findings from independent studies to assess the clinical effectiveness of healthcare interventions.
A Random Control Trial (RCT) is an experiment that delivers an intervention or treatment; subjects are randomly assigned to control and experimental groups, so it is the strongest design to support cause and effect relationships.
A Systematic Review is a comprehensive, unbiased review of multiple research studies that tries to identify, appraise, select and synthesize all high quality research evidence relevant to that research question.
