Evidence-based practice: A new approach to teaching the integration of research and practice in gerontology

One of the most conspicuous shortcomings of the social sciences has been. its failure to effectively integrate research and practice at the graduate level. To make sound decisions, graduate-prepared professionals and students need to be not merely able to describe the complementarity of research and practice in gerontology, but to be convinced of the relevance of research to their own present or anticipated careers. This paper describes a new approach to teaching the integration of research and practice in gerontology: evidence-based practice. This method is designed to train gerontology health and human service providers to actively access new multidisciplinary material in their practices to solve practical problems. Based on. the concept of evidence-based medicine, techniques are taught that involve (a) precisely defining a practice problem and the information required to solve it; (b) conducting an efficient search of the literature; (c) selecting the best of the relevant studies; (d) applying rules of evidence to determine their validity; (e) identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the studies; and (f) extracting the practice message and applying it to the patient, client, or organization (Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group, 1992). A discussion of the barriers to and the evaluation of this method of teaching is presented.