Practice of evidence-based dentistry sessions at Westmead Hospital – an important role for Medical Librarians

The Reference and Reader Services Librarian’s role ( from Westmead Hospital, a teaching hospital of Sydney University) to this program was to participate in the group tutorial by facilitating the students searching strategies. Each session consisted of 3 tutorials. During the first half of the tutorial, the tutor would try and get the students to identify a clinical problem from which they needed to develop and refine a search question. The Librarian became involved in the second half of the tutorial in showing the students to search the various resources such as Medline, Embase, EBMR databases. Search techniques involving subject headings versus keywords, boolean logic and the use of maximum precision and maximum recall filters for retrieving articles on therapy, etiology, prognosis, diagnosis, clinical trials and systematic reviews. After its first year of implementation of the program, the supervisor has reported positively to the University on the program and its great value to the students. This is evidenced in the fact that the Librarian has continued in this role as facilitator for the last 4 years. These sessions have further evolved and now the students are encouraged to first formulate a well structured question based on their clinical situation using the PICO model. In the PICO model P represents patient or problem, I for intervention, C for comparision, and finally O the outcome(s) of interest. These EBP sessions, apart from introducing the students to life long learning skills, was also meaningful to them as they were encouraged to look for evidence to back their clinical treatment of their patients.