NURS 7080 Advanced Practice in the Ambulatory Care of Women: Evidence-Based Practice

"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." [1]

Evidence-based practice involves 5 steps:

• Formulate a searchable question to satisfy the health needs of a specific patient
• Search the literature efficiently
• Read and critically evaluate the retrieved information to help make a clinical decision
• Carry out the decision
• Evaluate the outcomes of the applied evidence in your practice or patient [1 & 2]

There is a range in quality of evidence available in the literature, with systematic reviews being the very highest quality:

[3]

Other pyramid examples

(TRIP Database is described in more detail under Web resources in bottom right of this guide.)

Breaking up your question into these 4 elements (which you can easiliy remember with the acronym PICO) will make your literature search process easier:

• Description of the patient, population and/or the target disorder of interest
• What are the most important characteristics of the patient?
• How would you describe a group of patients similar to yours?
• What is the disorder and condition of interest?

Comparison intervention

• What alternative do you want to compare with the intervention?
• Examples: standard of care, reference standard, Placebo

Outcome

What outcome you hope to accomplish or measure? [1 & 2]

Hover your cursor over these links for a brief description of each web resource. (Note: These sites are not linked to the GSU Library's collection like the databases listed to the left, so additional steps may be required to determine if articles are available through the library.)