Science-Driven Care: Can Education Alone Get Us There by 2020?

More than a decade ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recognized evidence-based practice (EBP) as a key solution to ensure that the care delivered has the highest clinical effectiveness known to science.¹  To reach the IOM’s 2020 goal that “90% of clinical decisions will be supported by accurate, timely and up-to-date clinical information, and will reflect the best available evidence,”^2 (p4) clinicians need EBP competencies to guarantee that applicable research findings are integrated into clinical situations when congruent with patients’ preferences or values. Relevant EBP domains include (1) attitudes, (2) knowledge, (3) skills (application of knowledge by performing EBP steps in the clinical situations shown in Figure 1), and (4) behaviors (actual performance of EBP in practice).⁴  Thus, the PICO (patient, intervention, comparison, outcome) question chosen for this review was “What educational interventions are effective in building EBP attitudes,...