Assessing the degree of evidence based therapeutic intervention in a university based family medicine outpatient clinic

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Despite the development of medical knowledge and technology, it has long been pointed out that the treatment guidelines are not sufficiently based on evidence. It has not been yet studied how evidence based medicine is implemented when physicians make their therapeutic decision. The purpose of this study was to determine the degree of evidence based interventions in a university based family medicine outpatient clinic. METHODS: The degree of evidence based practice was evaluated using Ellis and Gills' method developed by the Evidence - Based Medicine Center in Oxford. The Patients' records of an outpatient clinic of a university hospital were reviewed on the primary diagnosis - intervention. The evidence based guidelines were defined as traditional textbooks and the results of randomized controlled trials found on databases such as Medicine, Clinical evidence, Best evidence, and Cochrane. ln case where there were no guidelines, consultation with the specialists was done. The degree of the evidence based therapeutic interventions was assessed by three levels. RESULTS: There were 179 primary diagnosis - intervention pairs, among them, 125 pairs (69.8%) of interventions were based on randomized controlled trial evidence and 19 pairs (10.6%) based on convincing non-experimental evidence. No evidence was found for 35 pairs (19.6%) . As a result, 80.4% of the total 144 pairs were regarded as evidence - based medicine. CONCLUSIONS: The result showed that considerable portion of the total cases were evaluated as based on clinical evidence, which is similar to the conclusions of the previous studies in other countries. We hope that future similar studies will be conducted in other institutions as well as in other specialities.