One of the fundamental skills required for practising
EBM is the asking of well-built clinical questions. To benefit patients and
clinicians, such questions need to be both directly relevant to patients'
problems and phrased in ways that direct your search to relevant and precise
answers. In practice, well-built clinical questions usually contain four
elements, summarised below.
One of the benefits of careful and thoughtful question-forming is that the search for evidence is easier. The well-formed question makes it relatively straightforward to elicit and combine the appropriate terms needed to represent your need for inform ation in the query language of whichever searching service is available to you.
Once you have formed the
question using the PICO structure, you can think about
what type of question it is you are asking,
and therefore what type of research would provide the best answer.