EBP: Roots In Evidence-Based Medicine

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EBP has its roots in evidence-based medicine. For thousands of years medicine contained many treatments that did not help patients, but caused actual harm. As early as the late 1800s physicians began to question traditional treatments and attempted primitive experiments to determine if treatments actually worked. By the 1970s the idea that care should be based on the scientific findings of randomized controlled studies rather than tradition was firmly accepted fact. The term evidence-based medicine was introduced in the 1990s to more accurately describe this shift of medicine from intuition and unsystematic clinical experience to scientific research. During this time, nursing was also changing rapidly due to increased technology. Nurses saw …show more content…

EBP has been implemented by most allied health professions.
EBP needs to be used to implement facility policies, unfortunately, this does not always happen quickly and easily.
Because knowledge is always increasing, EBP demands continual reevaluations of care to determine the best course of action. EBP is a never-ending process of assessing, researching, making changes based on the research, evaluating the outcome and implementing the changes into practice. While this may seem like a daunting task, the patient ultimately benefits.
EBP has done much to improve patient safety. Care not based on fact can, as pointed out earlier, actually be harmful. But EBP does not stop there. When properly implemented, EBP can also reduce errors in care by finding the best and most efficient ways of providing care, limiting human error.
With so much knowledge readily accessible in this internet age there is no reason why patients should not benefit from the many excellent scientific studies available. Using EBP is the best way to bring knowledge into active use, thus improving the treatment outcome of

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