Student Report - EBM Exercise

Welcome to the Student Report - EBM Exercise Course Guide!  This guide is intended to help those students randomly selected to present at a Student Report session and will walk the user through the steps of the EBM exercise.

For questions regarding the Student Report session itself (outside of the EBM exercise), please contact Allison Fairley, your session facilitator, or Dr. Emily Graham.

Users of this guide will be ready to:

• Understand the basic steps of Evidence Based Medicine.
• Search the background literature to help fill in their own background knowledge.
• Create a clinical foreground question using the PICO framework.
• Evaluate a list of potential resources for relevance, quality, and evidence-level.
• Select an article from this list that answers their clinical question.
• Provide a brief explanation of why they selected this article.

For the EBM exercise, we will follow the rough timeline as follows:

1. Tuesday: Approximately one week before the student report session, you should begin to think about which case you would like to discuss.  During this time, you may want to fill in some of your background knowledge of the topic(s) by using the resources in the Before You Begin page.
2. Wednesday: By Wednesday evening, you will send the Librarian (and the Student Report coordinators) a rough draft of your H&P and a clinical question about the case.  Ensure that all materials have been appropriately de-identified.
3. Thursday: Keep an eye on your email in case the librarian needs more information about your PICO question
4. Friday: The Librarian will search the literature to collect articles which will answer your question and send these resources back to you on Friday.
5. Monday: Over the weekend, you will go through the articles to evaluate them for quality, strength of evidence, and relevance to your question.  You will then select the article (or two articles) that you feel best answers your question and send this selection back to the Librarian by Monday.
6. Student Report Day: During the student report session, there will be a brief time at the end where this search process will be discussed.  The Librarian will either be present to discuss the search strategies used, or they will prepare a few slides with notes for you to present.  During this presentation you will be expected to discuss why you selected the article you did.