Paper from CHRC researchers about Clinical Questions in Primary Care was published

CHRC and NMS researchers Catarina Viegas Dias, David Rodrigues and Bruno Heleno along with Clara Jasmins affiliated to NMS had their paper “Clinical questions in primary care: Where to find the answers – a cross-sectional study” published in the journal PLOS One. 

Clinicians raise at least one question for every two patients they see, but search for an answer to less than half of these questions, and rarely use evidence-based resources; one common barrier to evidence-based practice is doubt that the search would yield an answer. Hence, this research team carried out a study to understand the proportion of clinical questions in primary care  possible to be answered with online evidence-based practice resources and to understand as well as the proportion of these that can be answered with ready-to-apply, pre-appraised evidence.

How was this study carried out?

“Cross-sectional study in two primary care practices. The inclusion criteria were family doctors, generalists and residents working in 2 selected practices. We collected a total of 238 questions from 19 family medicine specialists, 9 family medicine residents and 3 generalist doctors. Doctors were asked to record any clinical question that arose during 4 days of appointments. The primary outcome was the proportion of clinical questions answered with online evidence-based practice resources. The secondary outcome was the level of evidence needed to reach to find the answers (clinical summaries, systematic guidelines, systematic reviews or primary studies), according to the 5S evidence pyramid model.”

Learn more about the conclusions of this study here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0277462