Teaching evidence-based practice to speech and language therapy students in the United Kingdom

Abstract

We outline three ways in which evidence-based practice (EBP) is formally embedded into the curricula for pre-registration Speech and Language Therapy students and experienced Speech and Language Therapists at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. We describe key features of an undergraduate module, an undergraduate clinical placement, and a new Master's degree program, each aimed at encouraging critical thinking and clinical problem-solving skills in students.

Keywords:

• Education
• Academic training
• Teaching methods
• Instructional model
• Active learning
• Evidence-based practice

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the students who enrolled in the EBP module at Newcastle in the first four years it was offered. Their enthusiasm for learning about and applying the methods of EBP to explore clinical questions bodes well for the next generation of professionals and the people they serve.

Declaration of interest: The authors were employed by Newcastle University during the time the curriculum developments discussed in this paper were implemented, and they alone are responsible for the content and writing of this paper.

Notes

Source of funding: No source of funding reported.

Notes

1. The book's title, Bad Science, is also the name of the author's column that appears each Saturday in The Guardian newspaper and on the web (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/series/badscience).

2. Students have been uniformly positive about Greenhalgh's book, and because of that we continue to use it as the main course text. Since we began offering the course, Dollaghan's (2007) discipline-specific introduction to EBP in communication disorders has appeared, and we include it on the syllabus as a supplemental reading. We also suggest several other resources (e.g., Ajetunmobi, 2002; Haynes, Sackett, Guyatt, & Tugwell, 2006; Straus, Richardson, Glasziou, & Haynes, 2005) for future reference or for students wanting more advanced discussion of topics in Greenhalgh's book. In addition, students are made aware of resources such as the journal, Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention.

3. In the second and third years of the undergraduate program, students receive practical tutorials on the use of more general search tools such as the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar from the Speech and Language Sciences liaison librarian.

4. We are not aware of any consensus for how information from well-conducted experimental group designs could be combined with information from well-conducted SSEDs. More problematic is how evidence from different kinds of studies (e.g., RCTs, small-group cross-over designs, SSEDs) could be combined into a single meta-analysis. Combining studies of different designs requires the evaluator to make a number of assumptions, many of which cannot easily be justified. Arguably, the weight that should be given to different kinds of studies varies depending on the issues addressed, and there is as yet no consensus on how this should be done.

5. There are some problems an educational course cannot address. The most obvious are lack of time and access to the relevant literature. Clinicians and managers, if they are enjoined to deliver EBP, necessarily require the time to assess the available evidence and access to the necessary sources. Those are employers’ responsibilities.