Teaching evidence-based practice: the teachers consider the content

To identify the views of evidence-based practice (EBP) experts about information that should be included in EBP courses.

A two-round Delphi process.

The panel of experts in teaching EBP residing in developed and developing countries identified through purposive and snowball sampling.

We developed a list of 49 topics representing key educational topics. The panel scored the importance of topics for inclusion in introductory and advanced courses. In the second round, we sent a summary of results to the panel and asked them to re-score in light of the group's responses.

We used email to invite 105 EBP teachers to participate in the study. Fifty-one people from 15 countries agreed to participate, and 40 completed the second round. We achieved consensus that formulating clinical questions, searching pre-appraised resources, introduction to systematic reviews and critical appraisal of studies about therapy should be covered earlier in EBP courses while other critical appraisal topics and quantitative decision-making techniques should be left to more advanced levels.

Experts concur that introductory EBP courses should be simple and certain topics should be avoided. Specifically, critical appraisal and statistical methods should be left to advanced courses.