Abstract

BackgroundEvidence-based practice (EBP) has become an important competency in many allied and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) health care practitioners' professional standards of proficiency.MethodsTo compliment an EBP course for allied health care professionals and CAM practitioners, we undertook a questionnaire survey to assess learning needs. We developed a questionnaire to measure allied health care professionals and CAM practitioners' basic knowledge, skills and beliefs concerning the main principles of EBP. The questionnaires were administered to all attendees of one-day EBP workshops.ResultsDuring 2004–5 we surveyed 193 allied health care professionals and CAM practitioners who attended one-day EBP courses prior to commencement of teaching. Of the respondents 121 (62.7%) were allied health care professionals and 65 (33.7%) practitioners stated that they work in the CAM field Our survey found that the majority of the respondents had not previously attended a literature appraisal skills workshop (87.3%) or received formal training in research methods (69.9%), epidemiology (91.2%) or statistics (80.8%). Furthermore, 67.1% of practitioners specified that they felt that they had not had adequate training in EBM and they identified that they needed more training and education in the principles of EBM (86.7%). Differences in knowledge and beliefs concerning EBP amongst allied and CAM practitioners were found and length of time since qualification was also found to be an important factor in practitioner's beliefs. More CAM practitioners compared to allied health professionals accessed educational literature via the Internet (95.3% v 68.1%, p = 0.008). Whilst, practitioners with more than 11 years experience felt that original research papers were far more confusing (p = 0.02) than their less experienced colleagues.ConclusionThe results demonstrate that practitioner's learning needs do vary according to the type of profession, time since graduation and prior research experience. Our survey findings are exploratory and will benefit from further replication, however, we do believe that they warrant consideration by allied health care and CAM tutors and trainers when planning EBP teaching curricula as it is important to tailor teaching to meet the needs of specific subgroups of trainees to ensure that specific learning needs are met.

Highlights

  • Evidence-based practice (EBP) has become an important competency in many allied and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) health care practitioners' professional standards of proficiency

  • We found no courses available in our region. As both allied health care professionals and CAM practitioners are not catered for in traditional evidence-based medicine (EBM) postgraduate medical training, we developed an EBP course for allied health care professionals and CAM practitioners

  • Invitations were sent out to all CAM practitioners and allied health care professionals listed in a database of all registered practitioners that we developed by interrogating the West Midlands regional directory and relevant professional associations

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Summary

Introduction

Evidence-based practice (EBP) has become an important competency in many allied and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) health care practitioners' professional standards of proficiency. To ensure that relevant teaching and learning opportunities were realised, a needs assessment exercise was undertaken, as recommended by Harden [16] as an essential criteria which should be carried out when designing and developing any course and because EBP has not been a mandatory requirement of their training until recently. The findings of such an exercise can provide critical evidence for development and tailoring of EBP curricula improving the effectiveness of teaching. This allowed us the opportunity to compare and contrast different needs of groups according to specialty and time since qualification and to tailor our course to meet their specific needs

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