Evidence-Based-Practice

Evidence-Based Practice Resources

We at the National Center for Evidence-based Practice strive to make implementing evidence-based practice (EBP) as easy as possible for busy practicing clinicians. Although we have all studied research methods and/or statistics in grad school, many of us have stored that knowledge away into the category of “things I used to know before I took the Praxis.” To help dust off this valuable information and give you a refresher, ASHA has developed a series of resources on topics related to:

• online evidence searches,
• research design, 
• bias, appraisal tools and levels of evidence, and
• statistics.

Additionally, ASHA has updated its web pages to help guide you through the entire EBP process from start to finish. Even though we know we need to implement EBP, many of us don’t know where to start. Sometimes we turn to social media groups, Google searches, or even outdated notes from graduate school (guilty!). There is so much information that it makes it even harder to find recent, high-quality research that’s applicable to your clients. It doesn’t help that so many products and professional development courses use EBP as the “buzzword” for legitimacy. While some people use EBP as an adjective (“EBP approaches for language”), EBP is more nuanced than yes-or-no, in-or-out criteria.

 In fact, EBP refers to the entire dynamic, ongoing, process of defining a clinical question, gathering evidence, assessing that evidence and incorporating it all into a clinical decision.  With this process you consider external scientific evidence, clinical expertise, client perspective, and the internal data that you gather on a patient or client. You can use this process to make clinical decisions on any clinical question you come across and can feel confident that you are truly implementing EBP to achieve the best outcomes for your patients/clients without wasting time on interventions that don't work. 

Understand the process and give it a test run with your own clinical question at https://www.asha.org/Research/EBP/.

Rebecca Bowen M.A., CCC-SLP is a clinical research associate at ASHA’s National Center for Evidence-based Practice.