Evidence-based practice education for healthcare professions: an expert view
Introduction
To highlight and advance clinical effectiveness and evidence-based practice (EBP) agendas, the Institute of Medicine set a goal that by 2020, 90% of clinical decisions will be supported by accurate, timely and up-to-date clinical information and will reflect the best available evidence to achieve the best patient outcomes.1 To ensure that future healthcare users can be assured of receiving such care, healthcare professions must effectively incorporate the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes required for EBP into education programmes.
The promotion of EBP requires a healthcare infrastructure committed to supporting organisations to deliver EBP and an education system efficient in supporting healthcare professionals in acquiring EBP competencies.2 To this end, healthcare education programmes must effectively implement curricula that target these competencies.3 To facilitate this, the Sicily consensus statement on EBP provides a description of core knowledge and skills required to practise in an evidence-based manner and a curriculum that outlines the minimum requirements for educating health professionals in EBP.2 Initiatives such as the European Union Evidence-Based Medicine project4 and EBP teaching programmes for educators facilitated by Oxford (Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine) and McMaster Universities provide support in advancing the EBP agenda within healthcare education. Over the past two decades, more than 300 articles have been published on teaching evidence-based medicine alone and in excess of 30 experiments have been conducted to measure its effects.5 Recent reviews3 6 evaluating the adoption of evidence-based recommendations for teaching EBP however point to poor uptake of existing resources available to guide EBP education.
The application of EBP continues to be observed irregularly at the point of patient contact.2 5 7 The effective development and implementation of professional education to facilitate EBP remains a major and immediate challenge.2 3 6 8 Momentum for continued improvement in EBP education in the form of investigations which can provide direction and structure to developments in this field is recommended.6
As part of a larger national project looking at current practice and provision of EBP education across healthcare professions at undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing professional development programme levels, we sought key perspectives from international EBP education experts on the provision of EBP education for healthcare professionals. The two other components of this study, namely a rapid review synthesis of EBP literature and a descriptive, cross-sectional, national, online survey relating to the current provision and practice of EBP education to healthcare professionals at third-level institutions and professional training/regulatory bodies in Ireland, will be described in later publications.