PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lafuente-Lafuente, Carmelo
AU  - Leitao, Catia
AU  - Kilani, Insaf
AU  - Kacher, Zineb
AU  - Engels, Cynthia
AU  - Canouï-Poitrine, Florence
AU  - Belmin, Joël
TI  - Knowledge and use of evidence-based medicine in daily practice by health professionals: a cross-sectional survey
AID  - 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-025224
DP  - 2019 Mar 01
TA  - BMJ Open
PG  - e025224
VI  - 9
IP  - 3
4099  - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/3/e025224.short
4100  - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/3/e025224.full
SO  - BMJ Open2019 Mar 01; 9
AB  - Objectives Healthcare professionals are expected to firmly ground their practice in sound evidence. That implies that they know and use evidence-based medicine (EBM). In this study, our aim was to know how often health professionals actually made use of EBM in their daily practice.Design A questionnaire survey of healthcare professionals.Participants Healthcare professionals who attended six university postgraduate courses. 226 answered the questionnaire (144 physicians, 64 nurses and 24 pharmacists; response rate 63.3%).Setting 56.5% of respondents worked in hospitals (mostly non-teaching), 25.0% in nursing homes and 10.2% in primary care. All participants were French-speaking and lived in France or Switzerland.Measures Declared degree of knowledge and use of EBM, use of EBM-related information sources.Results Overall, 14.2% of respondents declared to use EBM regularly in their daily practice and 15.6% declared to use EBM only occasionally. The remaining respondents declared they: knew about EBM but did not use it (33.1%), had just heard about EBM (31.9%) or did not know what EBM is (4.0%). Concerning the use of EBM-related information sources, 83.4% declared to use at least monthly (or more often) clinical guidelines, 47.1% PubMed, 21.3% the Cochrane Library and 6.4% other medical databases.Fewer pharmacists (12%) declared to use EBM in their practice than nurses (22%) or doctors (36%). No difference appeared when analysed by gender, work setting or years after graduation. The most frequent obstacles perceived for the practice of EBM were: lack of general knowledge about EBM, lack of skills for critical appraisal and lack of time.Conclusions Only a minority of health professionals—with differences between physicians, nurses and pharmacists—declare to regularly use EBM in their professional practice. A larger proportion appears to be interested in EBM but seems to be deterred by their lack of knowledge, skills and personal time.