Introduction to sources of evidence Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Introduction to sources of evidence - Essay Example essor Archie Cochrane, a Scottish epidemologist, and his book â€Å"Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services†, which was published in 1972†. From then the advocates of the use of evidence-based learning in the field of healthcare have managed to position this practice as the best means for providing care for patients. Evidence-based poractice calls for the systemic review and judicious use of the available evidence. This means identifying the types of evidence that would be useful in making decisions on the practice of healthcare and the manner in which these can be integrated with the expertise that comes from clinical expertise and the choice of the client to achieving the best standards in the practice of healthcare. This provides the strength of evidence-based practice and from it also comes its limitations. The criteria of evidence-based practice calls for identifying the types of evidence. This means that there should be enough useful research studies done on the subject and the lack of it would leave gaps in the use of this practice. On the other hand a surfeit of literature causes the problem of sifting through this voluminous literature to identify useful information. (Guyatt, G. et al. Evidence-based medicine.(1992). A new approach to teaching the practice of medicine). The search for research studies to provide evidence for the practice of evidence- based medicine could be done in two ways. The first is using the collection of medical and nursing journals available in libraries. This means a lot of work in sifting through the journals available and is limited to these journals. Developments in the field of information and technology have provided a more convenient means in the Personal Computer and the Internet databases to enable more thorough searches through greater periods of time from the luxury of the chair at home. This does mean knowing having access to the databases and knowing how to use them. In this case the