Added July 2010
ACP Pier, produced by the American College of Physicians, has been added to the Resources section of this website under databases. It provides evidence-based support for clinical decision making and has been highly rated as a point of care product.
Also listed in our Resources section is the latest (4th) edition of Trisha Greenhalgh's classic textbook, How To Read a Paper: the Basics of Evidence Based Medicine. The new edition includes new chapters on quality improvement projects using ebm methods, and complex interventions - how to set up research projects involving both qualitative and quantitative methodology.
A new conference will be held this coming November in London, England, Evidence 2010: Transforming Healthcare. According to their website,"implementing cost-effective change based on evidence is the key challenge for health systems around the world." The aims of the conference include improving evidence-based decision making and developing ideas for using evidence in practice. For details, see the listing under the International conferences in the Learning section of this website..
Lisa Philpotts and Julia Shaw-Kokot, at the Health Sciences Library of UNC Chapel Hil, have compiled a comprehensive bibilography of Evidence Based Nursing Books, Articles and Websites. Articles include links to full-text when freely avaialble from the publishers. Other guides to evidence based resources for nursing and other disciplines can also be found in the Health Sciences Library's index to their Guides.
Speaking of guides, the Evidence Based Practice Center of Excellence (EBPCOE) team members are making plans to convert this website to a Guide using the LibGuides format. If you'd like to offer suggestions on how we can improve the content or other features of this website, please use our Feedback form!
We've done some weeding of articles listed in the website's Research section! Citations for articles published in 2005 or earlier have been removed from the current section, but they can still be found in the Archives.
Added April 2010
An EBP Institute workshop specifically designed for physical therapy faculty will be held May 21-22, 2010 in Pasadena, California. "EBP Institute faculty and participants will compare diverse educational models for teaching EBP in entry-level and post-professional curricula. Effective student-centered strategies for teaching search skills, critical appraisal, and evidence application will be presented."
See the Learning EBP section of this web site to find out about other upcoming learning opportunities.
A new book, intended to "help consumers make health decisions and understand evidence," has been published recently, and it's 
Les Irwig is making his book, Smart Health Choices, available online at the University of Sydney's web site. Summaries are provided for each chapter which can be downloaded in .pdf format. Included are chapters that help consumers understand what good evidence is, where to find it and how to apply it to themselves and their situations.
A recent JAMA editorial, "Evidence-Based Medicine Requires Appropriate Clinical Context," addresses one of the challenges of applying evidence. Editors McNutt & Livingston note that "to be most useful, evidence from clinical research studies must relate to a specific clinical context by more explicitly addressing variations in those clinical contexts that are relevant to individual patients." See JAMA. 2010;303(5):454-455.
One of the features of the Research section of this web site is the Educational Series, where articles published as part of a series in a given journal appear in alphabetical order by the title of the journal. This update includes the seventh article in a series in the Journal of General Internal Medicine by members of the EBM Teaching Scripts Working Group, "Tips for Teachers of Evidence-based Medicine: Making Sense of Decision Analysis Using a Decision Tree."
Added January 2010
JAMA has launched a new EBM online education tool, JAMAevidence: Using Evidence to Improve Care. It provides full-text access to both the second edition of the Users' Guides to the Medical Literature and The Rational Clinical Examination. Also included on the site are teaching tools, media, and interactive features to convey the best practices of evidence-based medicine. For more information. To preview the new site, go to: http://www.jamaevidence.com/ For a review of JAMAevidence, see the January 2010 issue of J Med Libr Assoc 98(10):93.
Tthe Joint Colloquium of the Cochrane Collaboration and the Campbell Collaboration will be held this year in October at the Keystone Resort in Colorado, USA. The Colloquim will focus on raising evidence-based decision-making to "new heights"! See the Learning EBP section of this web site for more details.
Decision-making is also a key component of PEP, and they will be holding their 5th PEP (Putting Evidence into Practice) Workshop in February in Alberta, Canada. PEP "involves applying evidence to clinical and policy decision making. Critical appraisal provides the tools to assess the quality of evidence in the medical literature and to determine the risks and benefits of different management strategies."
For those who aren't familiar with the methods of critical appraisal, a new edition of Dan Mayer's Essential Evidence Based Medicine is now available to help you "become a more discriminating reader of the medical literature by adopting the skills of critical appraisal." It includes two new chapters on critical appraisal of qalitative research and communicating risks and evidence to patients, and it is "geared towards the new learner, and assumes little clinical experience." For more details see the Resources section of this web site, under the heading Textbooks.
A leap of faith? An article in CMAJ (2009 Oct 13;181(8):488-93) describes what it takes to "transition from a single patient to a study of many patients" as a "leap of faith in generalizability." In his article, "Integration of evidence from multiple meta-alanyses: a primer on umbrella reviews, treatment networks and multiple treatments meta-analyses,"author Ioannidis notes that an even further leap is needed for the "transition from a single study to meta-analysis and from a traditional metaanalysis to a treatment network and multiple treatments metaanalysis, let alone wider domains."
Looking for a little humor to lighten your journal club assignment? Several recent articles from BMJ have been added to the Research section, demonstrating that, yes, research can be fun! For instance, read about the "Effect of listening to Nellie the Elephant during CPR training on performance of chest compressions by lay people: randomised crossover trial."
Added October 2009
Pencil it in! The annual Duke University workshop on Teaching and Leading EBM has been scheduled for March 22 -26, 2010. For more details go to the Learning Section of this website or the workshop website at http://www.mclibrary.duke.edu/training/courses/ebmworkshop/
Here are highlights from two articles just added to the Research Section of this website on the topic of systematic reviews:
While systematic reviews are generally considered good quality sources for evidence-based practice, inconsistencies in the quality of reporting the results of the reviews has led an international group PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) to develop a "27-item checklist and a four-phase flow diagram. The checklist includes items deemed essential for transparent reporting of a systematic review." A copy of the PRISMA Statement appears in the August 18, 2009 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, which also includes an Explanation and Elaboration document that "explains the meaning and rationale for each checklist item...The PRISMA Statement, this document, and the associated PRISMA web site should be helpful resources to improve reporting of systematic reviews and meta-analyses."
In the September 2009 issue of Pharmacotherapy, Coleman, Talati and White also question the consistency used to report results in systematic reviews. In the article "A Clinician's Perspective on Rating the Strength of Evidence in a SystematicReview," they provide a better understanding of the key criteria or domains that should be considered when rating the strength of a body of evidence, why they are important, and the domains included in some of the validated and commonly used scales. This not only will enable clinicians and health care decision makers to personally grade the strength of evidence and be able to extend it to their clinical practices, but also will allow them to understand which domains are and which are not covered, and how different grading scales can provide different results and still be accurate based on the domains they include."
Several books have been added to the Resources Section of this website including the 7th Edition (2010) of the nursing research textbook, Essentials of Nursing Research: Appraising Evidence for Nursing Practice, that has been "updated with stronger coverage of evidence-based practice, including content on how to read, interpret, and critique systematic reviews."
Paul Glasziou's book, Evidence-Based Medical Monitoring: From Principles to Practice, looks at how "monitoring principles adopted in clinical pharmacology and evidence-based medicine can be applied to chronic disease in the global setting."
Also new to the Resources Section is a book from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists titled The Pharmacists's Guide to Evidence Based Medicine for Clinical Decision Making. There is "an assumed minimal level of pharmacotherapy knowledge for the [non-pharmacist] reader... [but] reference to additional reading is made to assist those requiring a review."
This section compiled by:
Karen Crowell, UNC Chapel Hill
Last modified on
August 11, 2010