Where do I start to search for evidence?

You may have identified an area of practice that needs to be reviewed or improved as a result of clinical effectiveness activities such as audit, risk assessment or root cause analysis.  What would you do next?

More than two million articles related to healthcare are published annually in over 20,000 journals. It is impossible to read and keep up to date with everything which is why you need to have the skills to search the literature for the articles, books, reports or other material relevant to the question you have about your own practice.

Search skills help you identify:

• What research studies or audits have been done
• What others have learned
• Changes in practice or improvements have been made elsewhere
• Problems that other people have found in researching, auditing or improving patient care – and how they overcame them
• Who has written about the topic, when and where prior work has been done
• Gaps in knowledge and research.

Making your practice evidence-based involves:

• Identifying areas of practice that could be improved
• Searching for evidence of good practice
• Appraising the evidence for quality and relevance to define good practice
• Integrating the research evidence identified with clinical expertise and patient preferences to make decisions about patient care
• Evaluating the effectiveness of applying the evidence in clinical practice

Involving patients in proposals to improve a treatment or service will provide a different perspective and help identify where improvements can be made.

Your NHS Board should have library and research support services that can assist health professionals to identify clinical effectiveness information, and in some cases to interpret the evidence retrieved.  The Knowledge Network also includes help and tutorials on how to use the resources and information available.