Medical Education

The last thirty years has seen an explosion in the discipline of Evidence Based Medicine, to the extent that it is now the pervasive and dominant paradigm guiding clinical practice. The principles of EBM inform health professionals’ decision making by integrating the best available evidence with clinical expertise and patient values. Competency in EBM requires that clinicians are competent across a variety of disciplines including clinical epidemiology, biostatistics, information science and knowledge transfer. For evidence of best practice to be adopted by clinicians, it must survive the ‘evidence pipeline’. Clinicians must be able to implement the five steps of EBM; implement a form of continuous quality improvement; and be willing to change behaviour with respect to the adherence to evidence. Despite its ascent, it is clear that for many practitioners and patients care and self-management is conducted ignoring much available evidence. This extends from the lack of adherence to guidelines and consensus statements, irregular prescription of therapeutic interventions to the failure of the adoption of lifestyle interventions for common, preventable non-communicable diseases. In this session we will explore various challenges to the use of evidence in health, and how educational strategies might overcome these.