Question
How do you become an evidence-based OT? Where do you start?
Answer
You need to examine what it is you are doing by asking clinical and reflective questions. Take your time to track down the best evidence and use it to guide what you do. Appraise the evidence and think it through very carefully. You do not have to trust every research project or research paper that comes across your desk. If you think there are flaws, and there are going to be flaws, you can decide whether there are too many to use that intervention in your practice.
Think about how you are going to assess using these kinds of studies in your practice. You might just want to internally evaluate whether your outcomes have changed based on the implementation of a new intervention. This will help you maintain high standards of practice and positive outcomes.
How do you get started? Just some basic tips. You just read. Read as many articles on the topic as you can. Start with your PICO question and use it to drive your research into the literature. You can also start a journal club, either within your facility or if you have a local OT association. You can start one with like-minded practitioners who are involved in your area of practice. As I said earlier, go ahead and use students to help you stay current. They actually are coming out of school pretty skilled in this area, and can be really helpful. You can take whatever ideas that you have about how to get started and run with it.
Another place to start is the closest OT program. You can start with their website and see if researchers are doing investigations in your area of interest. You can contact them if they are. If not, you can also reach out to universities to see whether they have Masters or PhD students who are looking for projects. Sometimes that is a really helpful way to get quite a lot of assistance from both faculty and then from students as well. If there is not anyone local, you can read the literature and see who is doing that kind of work, and then contact the authors and see if they have any interest in using your site and partnering with you in some way. All of the telecommunications we have today allow us to do a lot more work at a distance. It is less challenging then you might think. I am in Ohio and I have used sites up and down the Northeast coast. I think that you can find someone who might be willing to partner with you.
