Evidence Based Practice and Evidence Based Medicine share the same base; that the best patient care involves the best evidence, clinical judgment, and patient preferences. How they approach patient care is slightly different.

Evidence Based Medicine: "Evidence based medicine is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. " (Sackett 1996)

Evidence Based Practice: "...an approach that enables clinicians to provide the highest quality of care in meeting the multifaceted needs of their patients." (Melnyk 2005)

“As a distinctive approach to patient care, EBM involves two fundamental principles. First, evidence alone is never sufficient to make a clinical decision. Decision makers must always trade the benefits and risks, inconvenience, and costs associated with alternative management strategies, and in doing so consider the patient’s values. Second, EBM posits a hierarchy of evidence to guide clinical decision making.”

Read the complete text of JAMA’s User’s Guides to the Medical Literature available at the UAMS Library for check out.

Sackett, D., et. al.  (1996) Evidence based medicine: What it is and what it isn't. BMJ 312:71-72.

Melnyk, B., Fineout-Overholt, E. (2005) Evidence-Based Practice in Nuring and Healthcare. Philidelphia, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

This self-paced tutorial guides health care practitioners and students through the basic steps in the EBP process: Duke Introduction to Evidence-Based Practice Tutorial.

Upon completion of this self-paced tutorial, you will be able to:

• define Evidence-Based Practice (EBP)
• identify the parts of a well-built clinical question
• identify searching strategies that could improve PubMed searching
• identify key critical appraisal issues that help determine the validity of a study