Course in Practicing EBM for Clinicians

Straus SE, Badenoch DS, Richardson WS, Rosenberg WM and Sackett DL

This is a self-contained, seven-session course for clinicians on how to practice evidence-based medicine: that is, how to integrate our individual clinical expertise with a critical appraisal of the best available external evidence from systematic research.

The practice of evidence-based medicine is a process of lifelong, self-directed, problem-based learning in which caring for one's own patients creates the need for clinically important information about diagnosis, prognosis, therapy and other clinical and health care issues, in which its practitioners:

• convert these information needs into answerable questions
• track down, with maximum efficiency, the best evidence with which to answer them (making best use of the increasing variety of sources of primary and secondary evidence)
• critically appraise that evidence for its validity (closeness to the truth) importance (size of effect) and usefulness (clinical applicability)
• integrate the appraisal with clinical expertise and apply the results in clinical practice
• evaluate their own performance

This syllabus is designed to help clinicians develop and improve those skills. In addition, it is designed to help Membership candidates prepare for the EBM portions of the Membership Examination.

Each of its seven sessions begins with an appropriate, full-text citation and is divided into two parts:

A	Going through the 5 steps with a patient, focusing on step 3 (critical appraisal), step 4 (integration with clinical expertise) and step 5 (self-evaluation).
B	Skills training, focusing on step 1 (forming answerable clinical questions) and step 2 (finding the best evidence), in which we introduce a variety of sources of evidence plus some strategies for analysing, summarising and storing the evidence in the form of one-page summaries ("Critically Appraised Topics" or CATs).

Contents

Session 1	Part A: Therapy (carotid endarterectomy)
	Part B: Introduction to the CATmaker software (optional)
Session 2	Part A: Diagnosis; Section 1: lung scans; Section 2: ferritin
	Part B: Asking answerable clincal questions
Session 3	Part A: Prognosis (stroke)
	Part B: Searching the evidence-based literature
Session 4	Part A: Systematic Reviews; Section 1: thrombolysis; Section 2: hypertension management
	Part B: Searching the primary literature
Session 5	Part A: Harm (calcium antagonists)
	Part B: Surfing the web for evidence
Session 6	Part A: Presentations
	Part B: Searching the Cochrane Library
Session 7	Part A: Presentations
	Part B: Feedback and celebration

The course materials comprise a Tutor's Manual and Learner's Manual. To order, print out this form and send it to the publisher, Radcliffe Medical Press.