“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 et al, 1996)

Evidence-based practice (EBP) means using the best, research-proven assessments and treatments in our day-to-day client care and service delivery. This means each clinician undertakes to stay in touch with the research literature and to use it as a part of their clinical decision making. EBP also means weighing the value of each part of the research evidence with clinical data and informed client choice. In other words, we need to know what the research says, share this knowledge in an unbiased way with our clients, and with those clients make decisions about care based on our evaluation. To be accountable for our EBP we should record both the decisions made and the evidence we used. Following such decisions, an EBP clinician will also collect data to show that the clinical decision is helping address the client’s goals.

EBP relies on clinicians understanding and evaluating the available research evidence and their own practice. To evaluate all the evidence would be a time consuming process and therefore a systematic approach to interpreting the research is required. This might include being a member of a journal club, an EBP