Psychology

Evidence-Based Practice in Psychology (EBPP)

EBPP is the integration of the best available research with clinical expertise in the context of patient characteristics, culture, and preferences.² This definition of EBPP closely parallels the definition of evidence-based practice adopted by the Institute of Medicine (2001, p. 147) as adapted from Sackett and colleagues (2000): "Evidence-based practice is the integration of best research evidence with clinical expertise and patient values." The purpose of EBPP is to promote effective psychological practice and enhance public health by applying empirically supported principles of psychological assessment, case formulation, therapeutic relationship, and intervention.

This statement was approved as policy of the American Psychological Association (APA) by the APA Council of Representatives during its August, 2005 meeting. http://www.apa.org/practice/resources/evidence/

APA Research Design for EBPP

APA Policy Statement outlines the different research designs that contribute to evidence based practice depending on the type of questions they can be used to address.

• Clinical observation (including individual case studies) and basic psychological science are valuable sources of innovations and hypotheses (the context of scientific discovery).
• Qualitative research can be used to describe the subjective, lived experiences of people, including participants in psychotherapy.
• Systematic case studies are particularly useful when aggregated (as in the form of practice research network) for comparing individual patients with others with similar characteristics.
• Single-case experimental designs are particularly useful for establishing causal relationships in the context of an individual.
• Public health and ethnographic research are especially useful for tracking the availability, utilization, and acceptance of mental health treatments as well as suggesting ways of altering these treatments to maximize their utility in a given social context.
• Process–outcome studies are especially valuable for identifying mechanisms of change.
• Studies of interventions as these are delivered in naturalistic settings (effectiveness research) are well suited for assessing the ecological validity of treatments.
• RCTs [randomised controlled trials] and their logical equivalents (efficacy research) are the standard for drawing causal inferences about the effects of interventions (context of scientific verification).
• Meta-analysis is a systematic means to synthesize results from multiple studies, test hypotheses, and quantitatively estimate the size of effects.

APA EBP Training

Evidence-Based Practice

"EBP is a problem-solving approach to clinical decision-making within a health care organization. It integrates the best available scientific evidence with the best available experiential (patient and practitioner) evidence. EBP considers internal and external influences on practice and encourages critical thinking in the judicious application of such evidence to the care of individual patients, a patient population, or a system." (p.4)

Dearholt, S. L., & Dang, D. (2012). Johns Hopkins nursing evidence-based practice : models and guidelines (2nd ed.) Indianapolis, IN: Sigma Theta Tau International.

Johns Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice Model and Tools

All tools reprinted with the permission of Johns Hopkins University ©The Johns Hopkins Hospital/The Johns Hopkins University.

EBP Model

©The Johns Hopkins Hospital/The Johns Hopkins University.

EBP Databases