EBM in practice: aged care

Clinical trials often exclude older people, and complex interventions are incompletely studied, making it difficult to implement evidence-based medicine in some areas of aged care. There is good-quality evidence to guide the treatment of many of the common clinical problems encountered in older people. Use of outcome measures in trials (eg, quality-adjusted life-years or disability-adjusted life-years) that are normally applied to the general population may disadvantage older people, for whom regaining independence is the chief concern. There is a gap between the availability of evidence and its application in routine provision of medical care for older people.