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Evidence based practice

What is evidence based practice?

Evidence based practice is a combination of practitioner expertise and knowledge of the best external research, and evaluation based evidence. It involves a careful, clear and thoughtful use of up-to-date evidence when making decisions about how to work with individual parents. Evidence based practice also includes steps which a practitioner or service can use to ensure that everything they do is evidence based.

Evidence based practice is:

“Finding out what works, and ensuring that the interventions we and others make in children’s lives are as good as they possibly can be”.

(Lloyd, 1999)

Evidence based practice involves a practitioner bringing their own knowledge and skills together with best quality evaluation research to make a decision about selecting what programme/intervention is most appropriate to the parents/children they are working with.

There are five things that a practitioner needs to think about when they are engaging in evidence based practice:

  1. Evidence based theory.
  2. Practitioner skills, qualities and knowledge.
  3. Programme and practitioner fidelity.
  4. Clear eligibility criteria.
  5. The best research evidence base.
Page updated: 23 December 2010

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