Web Site Resources
Resources and Tools for Evidence Based Health Care in Developmental Disabilities
Resources for the General Practice of EBHC
McMaster University is the acknowledged leader in the development of the principles of evidence based health care and the methodological underpinnings of health services research. Much of this has been led by Dr. David Sackett. Sackett and his colleagues (at McMaster and more recently at Oxford where 5 years ago, he became Director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine) have spent nearly 20 years researching, teaching, and evaluating strategies that support the practice of evidence based health care. They are responsible for the following. Find out more about each by going to their Web site:
- Evidence-based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM 3rd Edition (2005)by Straus SE, Richardson WS, Paul Glasziou, and Haynes RB. This little guidebook in paperback is so clear, well-written, and even entertaining, that you can use it to teach yourself this process. This book, by the way, has a extremely thorough section on how to search for evidence—on the Internet, in specialized databases and on Medline. The book really is a must-have!
Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (Oxford, UK): http://www.cebm.net
The teaching and support strategies developed and offered at McMaster have been extended by the group at Oxford as follows:
- Workshops on practicing and teaching EBHC
- EBM Toolbox: support for doing critical appraisal of research based on the EBM book
- CATmaker: a program that helps you write critically appraised topics
- CATbank: database of critically appraised topics
- Evidence Based On Call: practice guidelines tied to critically appraised topics (new project that will become a book)
(The website invites interested people to contribute to the EBOC book and/or to the CATbank.)
National Library of Medicine, Medline Searching (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed)
Medline can be searched on the Internet free of cost sing a search engine (program) called PubMed. A specialized search feature intended to help clinicians detect best evidence through the Medline database. In the PubMed menu, select Clinical Queries to get built-in search filters that will help you identify only those clinically sound studies of etiology, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of disorders.
This feature uses research methodology that was the result of another of the efforts of the McMaster group to improve the extraction, synthesis and organization of the research evidence most suited to direct clinical application.
Resources for Practice Guidelines/CATs/Policy Statements
American Academy of Pediatrics (http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/)
The AAP has published approximately 300 policy statements, practice guidelines, and model bills although a cursory look through suggests that many are either very general statements or are based on expert opinion. (delete this part of the sentence please) The evidence based topics address the most common childhood diseases (i.e., asthma, otitis media), but there are a few which are relevant to developmental disabilities. (Show "Dolman Delacato Treatment of Neurologically Handicapped Children".)
A useful CATbank
- University of North Carolina CATs: www.med.unc.edu/medicine/edursrc/!catlist.htm
- University of Washington CATs: weber.u.washington.edu/~ebm/topic/index.html
Resources for Systematic Reviews of Evidence
As is true for the secondary journals that filter out the best evidence published in primary journals, for practice guidelines, and for critically appraised topics, priority for evidence based systematic reviews has generally gone to the most common health problems of adults.
Centre for Reviews and Dissemination.(York, UK): http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/
The Cochrane Collaboration and the Cochrane Library: http://www.cochrane.org/
The Cochrane Collaboration is an international non-profit organization whose aim is to make up to date information about effects of health care readily available worldwide. There are collaborative groups in several countries which take responsibility for building the evidence base for various areas of health care.