Evidence-Based Practice is...

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a term that is familiar to doctors, nurses, allied health, and other health professionals. Increasingly there is an expectation by health services, managers, patients, and other consumers, that the ‘best available evidence’ is used to underpin clinical decision-making and provide the best possible outcomes for patients.

EBP is an interdisciplinary approach to patient care and treatment. EBP started in medicine as evidence-based medicine (EBM) and then spread to other fields such as nursing, psychology, education, information services, and others.

Dr David Sackett, one of the early pioneers of EBM, first defined EBP. The current accepted definition of the process is ‘integrating the best available research evidence with clinical expertise and the patient's unique values and circumstances’ [1] .

These terms are defined as:

Best available clinical evidence

Clinically relevant research drawn from studies with the least possible bias.

Individual clinical expertise

The use of clinical skills and past experience to enable accurate diagnosis, the most appropriate choice of treatment and the optimum form of care.

Patient values and expectations

The patient’s clinical condition, individual concerns, preferences, and expectations.

Bias

Deviation of a measurement from the true value leading to either an over or under-estimation of the treatment effect. Bias may originate from different sources: allocation of patients, measurement, interpretation, publication, and review of data.