With our student librarians, we’ve been exploring evidence-based health care and librarian competencies in LIBR534 – Health information sources and services. We are teaching (and re-learning) the basic principles and frameworks for EBP. In that spirit, here is a resurrected and slightly modified top ten competencies in EBP circa 2010. 
- Articulate the five (5) steps of evidence-based clinical practice (EBCP)
- Formulate good clinical questions
- Understand the hierarchies of evidence from the anecdote to gold standard (RCT)
- Search by clinical domain ie. diagnosis, etiology, prognosis, qualitative, therapy
- Describe expert role(s) assumed by librarians in evidence-based practice
- Teaching ability. Knowledge of learning styles, sources, strategies and filters
- Be familiar with basic research, methodologies, statistics and assessment
- Engage in critical appraisal and reflective practices
- Understand the systematic review process and exhaustive searching
- Assume expert searching roles for database searching (MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE, Web of Science, PSYCINFO, ERIC, etc.); pre-appraised sources (Cochrane and related tools); and grey literature (Google, Yahoo, Scirus and other open search tools).
See also: Top Ten Reference Competencies in the Health Sciences
Yvonne Chan
lse721
Thanks for a thought-provoking article, Dean.
I am curious about your evidence pyramid. There seem to be several versions of this floating around (McMaster’s current one is at http://www.medlib.iupui.edu/body.cfm?id=323 and looks somewhat different from yours), and when I’ve asked other librarians where they think a particular resource, such as DynaMed, fits on the pyramid, there’s not always consensus in their responses. So, is the pyramid itself evidence-based? Has it ever been evaluated to see if practitioners find it helpful?
I was also glad to see you mention statistical knowledge, albeit briefly. I work with a lot of researchers in policy, prevention, and health promotion, and they use tons of statistics in their work. It is unique data that can’t be gathered through any other method, and more data sets are becoming available in the public domain. Are medical librarians on top of what’s available, where to get it, and how to use it?
It’s also amazing what you can do with layering statistical data sets on top of GIS software to note geographic trends. I think this is a huge element of EBM that most people really haven’t thought of yet, and I’m not really sure where it fits. I attended the National Summer Institute on Statistical and GIS Analysis of Health Data last summer, and even though much of it was (WAY) over my head, the GIS portion of the course in particular was absolutely mind-blowing; I’d seen things like healthmap.org before and thought they were neat, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg for what can be done with sophisticated software and complex data sets.
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