Becoming Evidence Based Practitioners: A Study of Final Year Health Professional Students at the University of Limerick

Background: Evidence based practice (EBP) is pivotal to health professionals and the need to ensure best outcomes for clients is increasingly important. It is therefore essential that health care professional students are... [ view full abstract ]

Background:

Evidence based practice (EBP) is pivotal to health professionals and the need to ensure best outcomes for clients is increasingly important. It is therefore essential that health care professional students are able to adopt an evidence based approach to their practice. This study aimed to investigate final year occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and physiotherapy students self reported knowledge, attitudes and behaviours towards EBP.

Method:
111 final year health profession students (occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and physiotherapy) completed an amended version of the Knowledge, Attitude and Behaviour (KAB) questionnaire, (Johnston et al., 2003). Data was analyzed using the Statistical Packages for Social Science using version 21.0 (SPSS Inc, 2012).

Results:
The majority of students (94%) reported accessing evidence weekly or more often. 95.5% of students use the Internet to source and to access evidence. 98% of students believed that EBP was useful and 96% will incorporate it into their future practice. Barriers to utilization of EBP included lack of time; difficulty finding evidence and not observing practice educators using EBP while on practice education.

Conclusion:
Curricula prepared students to become evidence based practitioners. It was an integral part of routine learning and they intended to incorporate EBP into their future practice. Challenges existed in relation to how students will maintain their EBP skills in the transition from University settings to the work place.

Application to Practice:Collaboration between universities and practice settings is pivotal in devising strategies to facilitate newly graduated therapists to maintain EBP skills.