WEEK 3 A

Week 3 A

Week 3 A

Introduction

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is one of the most important developments in decades for the helping professions—including medicine, nursing, social work, psychology, public health, counseling, and all the other health and human service professions (Briggs & Rzepnicki, 2004; Brownson et al., 2002; Dawes et al., 1999; Dobson & Craig, 1998a, 1998b; Gilgun, 2005; Roberts & Yeager, 2004; Sackett et al., 2000). That is because evidence-based practice holds out the hope for practitioners that we can be at least as successful in helping our clients as the current available information on helping allows us to be. Both the importance and the multidisciplinary nature of EBP can be seen in the Roberts and Yeager (2004) compendium, Evidence-Based Practice Manual, a collection of chapters describing the meaning, methods, and examples of EBP.

Evidence-based practice represents both an ideology and a method. The ideology springs from the ethical principle that clients deserve to be provided with the most effective interventions possible. The method of EBP is the way we go about fi nding and then implementing those interventions (see, e.g., manuals on EBP methods by Gibbs, 2003; Cournoyer, 2003; and Rubin, 2007; see also http: // www.evidence.brookscole.com/index.html). Evidence-based practice represents the practitioner's commitment to use all means possible to locate the best (most effective) evidence for any given problem at all points of planning and contacts with clients. This pursuit of the best knowledge includes extensive computer searches, as described in the following (Gibbs & Gambrill, 2002).

Evidence-based practice is an enormous challenge to practitioners because the methods of locating the most effective interventions go beyond, or are more rigorous than, even those of empirically-based practice. Thus, for example, where a practitioner using empirically-based practice might be satisfi ed with locating two or three controlled studies as evidence of effectiveness (Chambless et al., 1996, 1998), practitioners using EBP will do whatever it takes to locate all studies of effectiveness on a particular problem, typically using reviews of research on intervention effectiveness, and then critically assessing the studies in those reviews for evidence of validity and utility for practice.

The emphasis in EBP is on the comprehensiveness of the search and critical evaluation of the results, all in as close collaboration with clients as possible, including sensitivity to socially and culturally relevant approaches to intervention (Ancis, 2003; Mio & Iwamasa, 2003; Sue & Sue, 2004).

We believe the evidence-based practice model and the evaluation-informed practice approach, in a sense, complete each other. The one uses a systematic and comprehensive search of the empirical literature to fi nd what works best, the other provides methods for ongoing monitoring, guiding, and evaluating client progress. People and their situations are complex. So many things can go wrong during an intervention, even given the best of relationships, that the evidence-based practitioner always monitors and evaluates progress with every case and situation so as to be able to tell how well the intervention is—or is not—progressing.

Thus, to be a well- rounded evidence-based practitioner, we strongly recommend the use ...