Abstract
Significant efforts in the past decades to teach evidence-based practice (EBP) implementation has emphasized increasing knowledge of EBP and developing interventions to support adoption to practice. These efforts have resulted in only limited sustained improvements in the daily use of evidence-based interventions in clinical practice in most health professions. Many new interventions with limited evidence of effectiveness are readily adopted each year—indicating openness to change is not the problem. The selection of an intervention is the outcome of an elaborate and complex cognitive process, which is shaped by how they represent the problem in their mind and is mostly invisible processes to others. Therefore, the complex thinking process that support appropriate adoption of interventions should be taught more explicitly. Making the process visible to clinicians increases the acquisition of the skills required to judiciously select one intervention over others. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the selection process and the critical analysis that is required to appropriately decide to trial or not trial new intervention strategies with patients.
Highlights
Academic Editors: David Putrino, Mar Cortes and Joseph E
All health professions have mandated the use of evidence-based practice (EBP) as a tenet of ethical practice [1] as it is known to improve healthcare quality, reliability, and client outcomes [2,3]
Cognitive mapping has been demonstrated to support EBP uptake [83,84]. This may be due to integration of the new information into their causal model of the problem [84], which increases the likelihood of an EBP being viewed as an alternative action to achieve the outcome
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Over the last twenty years, skills and knowledge have significantly improved [4] and a great deal of effort (as well as the development of the fields of implementation science and knowledge translation) has gone into increasing the use of evidence-based practices (EBPs) by clinicians. Adoption of new interventions may not be the issue related to low EBP implementation as clinicians report frequently adopting and trialing new interventions with no or low evidence [16,26] This suggests that we may need to take a step back and reexamine how we are defining and attempting to solve the problem of low implementation. We suggest that students need to be explicitly taught how to assess their personal causal models and the decision-making process
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