Overview:
>>Alison Lane: Amy and I are very happy to present and share this information with you andare also very excited to see the interest in this topic. We believe that evidence-based practice (EBP) for clinicians is really of prime importance in practice settings: hospitals and communitysettings, as well as, pediatrics and adults. It is a very important component of what we do.
Today we want to give you the key elements of evidence-based practice, and start to equip you with some basic skills. Hopefully you will go away from today’s session with these skills and be able to use them immediately in your practice settings. Our aim is to point you in the direction of resources that you can access from your workplaces or home fairly easily, and to give you some ideas of some immediate things that you can do as well as some longer term things that you can do to improve evidence-based practice.
What we are going to be covering today are guidelines to help you develop clinical questions to define your inquiries in evidence-based practice and ultimately help you decide on the best approach for a particular client or patient. We will also help you to identify evidence-based and research databases that will have resources and publications that you can use to help you answer your clinical questions. We then will briefly overview some questions that you might want to consider when you are critically appraising a research article. For example, once you have found some information to help you with your practice area, how do you go about reading that information, interpreting that information, and taking the salient points from it that will help you make a decision about changes you might need to make?
Finally, we would like to finish with some simple methods of implementing EBP principles in practice, and also seek your input as to efforts you have already made or questions that you have around some of the practicalities of doing evidence-based practice in your setting.
Introduction:
We are going to begin immediately with an activity. We will get to test out all these wonderful tools for questions and answers on this site in order to interact with you. First, I want to ask you to consider at this point, what might be a practice challenge in your practice setting? This might be a practice challenge with regard to a client that is particularly complex or it might be a service delivery issue. There may be some particular barriers or constraints around how you provide your service that you want to find alternative methods or ways of managing that. It may be something more about just understanding what might be the best approach in terms of assessment or in terms of the rate and intensity of a treatment approach for a given population of clients that you see. If you can take a moment to jot down two or three of these practices challenges that are very immediate for you at this time, and I am going to ask you to share them briefly with me using the question and answer pod. We will come back to these later in the presentation, and I will help you try to frame some evidence-based practice questions around them.
