At Duke, residents receive extensive practical skills training in information technology, critical appraisal, and medical decision-making to prepare for lifelong learning. A critical mass of attendings and supervisors trained in EBM approaches apply these to medication and psychosocial therapies, alike.

EBM is a means for life long learning

If you are a life long learner, chances are you are already generating clinical questions about patient care and are looking for more information about therapy, diagnosis or prognosis. Scanning scores of journal articles may not be the most efficient way to get specific information.

EBM can help you:

• develop a focused clinical question
• search for the information efficiently
• evaluate the available evidence critically

Once you have done the above, you can use your clinical expertise to apply the information to your patient after considering their individual circumstances.
 

This is what one life long learner has to say about practicing EBM: In the settings where I take care of patients and teach residents and medical students, there can be a lot of uncertainty about how best to proceed in patient care, or even how exactly to interpret a certain test result. Knowing how to ask a focused, searchable clinical question and then appraise the literature I come across is an invaluable tool in daily patient care. It helps me to have informed discussions about medical decision-making with patients, families, and other members of the healthcare team. I also find that having a working knowledge of validity criteria and EBM in general helps me when thinking about research questions and research design for questions I may try to study.

Jane P. Gagliardi, MD - Clinician and Educator, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and Department of Medicine.