Evidence-Based Practice

Evidence-Based Practice

Introduction

Health is the most crucial aspect of human life, thus it is essential for care providers to ensure that they provide effective healthcare to their clients. They need to assure that they are trained and have acquired relevant skills that are important in the medical field. It is important to be an expert to ensure to provide effective care to its patients, expertise in the field can be gained through experience and clinical practice (Mullen, 2004). Evidence-based Practice (EBP) is a method of healthcare where the healthcare providers use the best evidence possible that is the most relevant information and appropriate information available to make decisions for individual patients. It is a decision making approach that does not only involve evidences but it is a complex method which examines the characteristics, situations and preferences of individuals. EBP recognizes that each individual has different health care needs and that health care services are ever changing and involves uncertainties (Lim, 2008).

Background and History

In healthcare organizations it is necessary to ensure the well-being of clients. The quality of health care services was declining thus resulting in poor health and dissatisfied patients. It is essential for the health care providers to make certain that they have acquired scientific knowledge to minimize the risk associated with health services that are provided to clients. Many problems arise with lack of ability of health care providers to deliver effective care to their clients, which resulted in an increase need to have methods and approaches to deliver effective and quality care to the clients (www.asha.org). Patients die or otherwise come to grief, a bad or unhappy outcome would result from different reasons that may include; ignorance, carelessness or inattention at individual level or at collective level, being incompetent and deception by the patient. Hence to avoid these problems to occur it was important to have an effective approach that would allow the care providers to ensure efficient care and effective outcome to the patients (Lim, 2008).

Evidence can be defined as a conceptual warrant for a belief or action. The Evidence-Based Practice movement was started by Archie Cochrane who was a physician and worked as a social activist in Great Britain during WWII. In 1972 Cochrane determined that it is essential for every citizen to have knowledge about healthcare and scientific information about medicine. In the same year, 1972 he was invited to Britain for examining a governing agency for research and practice and the resulting document was formulated that become the Evidence-Based Practice (www.asha.org). He stated that healthcare providers should demonstrate their practices to patients and assure that the decisions that make are not only based on scientific evidence rather than personal belief. Cochrane believed that this is social justice issue, and this would also bring a change towards scientific research and will allow having a hierarchy of evidence served for empowering patients and their families. The model that Cochrane provided for Evidence-based Practice has its foundation on three characteristics; effectiveness, efficiency and ...