| PICO | Patient or Problem, Intervention, Comparison Intervention, Outcome |
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Why should I formulate a structured research question?
Where do questions fit into evidence-based practice?
Where do questions come from?
What characterizes a good question?
What does an undeveloped question look like?
What does a well-formulated question look like?
“Is a fall prevention program more effective than education upon discharge from acute care in decreasing the incidence of falls in elderly clients who live independently at home?” (Lou & Durando, 2008, p. 98)
| PICO | Patient or Problem, Intervention, Comparison Intervention, Outcome | |
| suitability: | Good for therapy/treatment or diagnosis type questions. | |
| example: | "In an elderly man with a stroke, does admission to a stroke unit decrease the risk of death and dependency?" (CEBM, 2010) | |
| more... | Includes examples for therapy, prognosis, diagnosis, and harm scenarios. | |
| PICO + | Problem/Person, Client’s setting, Client’s values, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome | |
| suitability: | A variation on PICO, so named by Kloda (2010). Emphasizes the client’s setting and values. | |
| example: | None provided by authors; implied in the question. (Bennett & Bennett, 2000). | |
| COPES | Client Oriented Practical Evidence Search | |
| suitability: | For stating client type and problem, what you might do, alternate course of action, what you want to accomplish. | |
| example: | "For abused or neglected children placed in foster care by a protective service worker, which risk assessment measure will provide the greatest predictive accuracy to predict reabuse when children are placed back into the homes with their families?" (Gibbs, 2003) | |
| more... | ||
| PESICO | Person, Environment, Stakeholders, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome | |
| suitability: | Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) | |
| example: | "In a 4-year-old child with autism and some vocal imitation skills in need of acquiring linguistic communication who is placed in a segregated preschool (disabled peers) seeking to move to an inclusive preschool (nondisabled peers) and whose preschool teacher and SLP are primarily concerned with communication, whereas his parents wish to enhance his speech as well will the use of certain AAC approaches in comparison to other AAC approaches enhance natural speech production while increasing communication skills?" (Schlosser, Koul, & Costello, 2007) | |
| PIPOH | Population, Interventions, Professionals/Patients, Outcome, Health Care Setting | |
| suitability: | Developed specifically for use in the adaptation of oncology guidelines (ie. the health care setting and context in which a guideline is to be implemented). | |
| example: | "What is appropriate cervical cancer screening for average risk women seen in primary care?" (ADAPTE Collaboration, 2009) | |
| ECLIPSE | Expectation, Client group, Location, Impact, Professionals, Service | |
| suitability: | Health policy/management information. | |
| example: | "There is a lack of continuity of care in my area for people with head injuries who are discharged from hospital to the community rehabilitation service. I would like to improve the discharge procedure to avoid this problem. The service involves both community health staff and social services. Has anyone else experienced similar problems and how have they overcome them?" (Wildridge & Bell, 2002) |
The ADAPTE Collaboration. (2009). The ADAPTE process: resource toolkit for guideline adaptation. Version 2.0. Retrieved from http://www.g-i-n.net/document-store/adapte-resource-toolkit-guideline-adaptation-version-2
Bennett, S. & Bennett, J. W. (2000). The process of evidence-based practice in occupational therapy: Informing clinical decisions. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, 47, 171-180.
Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. (2010). Formulating answerable clinical questions. Retrieved from http://ktclearinghouse.ca/cebm/practise/formulate
Gibbs, L. (2003). Evidence based practice for the helping professions: a practical guide with integrated multimedia. Pacific Grove, CA: Wadsworth.
Kloda, L. & Bartlett, J. (2010, June 9). From uncertainty to answerable questions: question negotiation in evidence-based practice. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Health Libraries Association/Association des bibliotheques de la santé du Canada, Kingston, ON. Retrieved from http://www.chla-absc.ca/2010/graphics/chla2010-slides-paper06.pdf
Lou, J. & Durando, P. (2008). Asking clinical questions and searching for the evidence. In M. Law & J. MacDermid (Eds.), Evidence-based rehabilitation: a guide to practice (pp. 95-117). Thorofare, NJ: Slack.
Schlosser, R., Koul, R., & Costello, J. (2007). Asking well-built questions for evidence-based practice in augmentative and alternative communication. Journal of Communication Disorders, 40(3), 225-238. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2006.06.008
Wildridge, V., & Bell, L. (2002). How CLIP became ECLIPSE: a mnemonic to assist in searching for health policy/management information. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 19, 113-115. doi: 10.1046/j.1471-1842.2002.00378.x
