© 2000 Evidence-Based Mental Health
EBMH notebook
Answering mental health questions with reliable research evidence
Director of Knowledge Services, Centre for Evidence Based Mental Health Email: andre.tomlin@psych.ox.ac.uk
Finding answers to questions that arise in every day clinical practice has always been an arduous task. The time and effort that it takes to interrogate the wide range of information resources that are now available is rarely rewarded with a gold nugget of evidence. It seems that every new week brings a new journal or web site that promises to solve our problems of information overload, when in reality these new resources often add to our sense of confusion as to where to start searching.
We have previously introduced readers to the concept of clinical question formulation as the essential first step of evidence-based practice.1 Having formulated our clinical question, there are generally 4 places that we go to find an answer2:
- Ask a colleague or expert
- Look in a recent textbook
- Search your personal reprint file
- Use an electronic database.
Asking a colleague or expert is often
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