Approaches to teach evidence-based practice among health professionals: an overview of the existing evidence

Introduction

The delivery of high-quality and safe patient care has been of utmost importance for all regulatory agencies. This has an impact on clinical decision-makers who encourage health care providers to incorporate evidence-based practices (EBPs) to provide high-quality clinical care. EBP integrates epidemiology, statistics, and research methodology into health care. The whole EBP process includes four steps: a) formulation of a focused research question, b) access relevant literature, c) critical appraisal of the validity of the existing research, and d) application of the findings to the decision-making.¹

There is increasing evidence illustrating that health care professionals have a positive attitude towards EBP.^2,3 Nonetheless, their understanding and skills related to EBP are inadequate.^2–4 As a result, implementation of EBP has been challenging as only one in four health professionals provide care within an EBP framework.^5,6 Today's health care professionals have different levels of EBP knowledge and skills, depending on their education, experience, and own interest.^5,7 Providing an organization of baseline information on EBP permits the development of educational initiatives and changes in order to enhance EBP incorporation into daily practice. As practices, beliefs, and skills of staff related to EBP may affect the success of initiatives to implement EBP, more research in these areas is valuable for assessing future implementation strategies.

This systematic review attempted to accumulate the existing knowledge and experience on how EBP strategies are taught over the last years with the aim to increase the awareness, knowledge, and positive attitudes and perceptions towards EBP of health professionals. The primary and main objective of this review was to explore and define the best approaches for teaching EBP to health professionals.

Methods

Our research team has previously conducted a systematic review to summarize the present approaches for teaching EBP among health care students.⁸ As a further step, we decided to expand our search on the existing approaches to teach EBP to health care professionals, including medical doctors of any specialty and nurses, by incorporating a similar methodology approach.⁸ The review protocol of this review was based on the protocol developed for the review of health students already published elsewhere.⁸ Briefly, a protocol was developed according to the MOOSE Guidelines for Meta-analyses and Systematic Reviews of Observational Studies.