Seminar Highlights Need for Evidence-Based Practice in Health Sciences

BY: .

Staff, students and a host of healthcare practitioners attended a seminar on Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) organised by the Discipline of Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) and presented by Professor Ralf Schlosser of the United States.

The widely published professor from the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northeastern University in Boston, Schlosser is also the Director of Clinical Research at the Centre for Communication Enhancement’s Autism Language Programme at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Schlosser is a three-time winner of the Editors Award for Augmentative and Alternative Communication; the founding joint editor-in-chief of Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention and also serves on the Editorial Board of several professional journals.

Schlosser’s full-day seminar was the result of a joint National Research Foundation-funded initiative, spear-headed by Professor Shakila Dada, a UKZN graduate now based at the University of Pretoria, and Professor Mershen Pillay from the Discipline of SLP at UZKN. This seminar series is part of a broader plan to develop firmer working relationships and to strengthen disciplinary ties between the two universities.

The decision to host Schlosser in collaboration with the University of Pretoria was based on his relevance and appeal to both researchers and practitioners in light of the significance of EBP for both groups, said Academic Leader for the Discipline of SLP at UKZN, Dr Penelope Flack.  Flack said there was a growing need to expose researchers, postgraduate students as well as healthcare practitioners to EBP. It was important for the latter to realise that they too had important contributions to make to research.

Schlosser said in addition to clinical expertise, all the practices carried out by healthcare professionals today needed to be supported by research evidence. 

The seminar was geared towards equipping participants with the skills and knowledge related to key steps of the EBP process, namely: how to ask a well-built question, searching for evidence, appraising evidence, and the application of the evidence effectively within the respective professions.

Schlosser and his colleagues have expanded the PICO model used in evidence based medicine by including two additional aspects relevant for speech language therapy practice, namely: the environment or context of the client as well as the stakeholders, typically the communication partners of the client, in the parameters to be considered when developing the clinical question.

He explained that EBP was an evolving concept which fundamentally replaced eminence-based, convenience-based as well as habit-based practice. He said EBP provided healthcare practitioners with possible assessments and interventions, addressed the research-to-practice gap, and led them to meet the increasing demands for accountability.

According to Schlosser, many practitioners take little or no time to review current research findings. He suggested that even busy practitioners could initiate EBP through a little effort. ‘Building up a good question is an important step of the EBP process because everything else hinges on it,’ he advised.

Guiding the participants though practical examples, he said the EBP process involved developing a well-built question, selecting and searching sources of evidence, examining and synthesising the evidence, using clinical judgment to select assessment or intervention approaches based on the evidence,  then evaluating the application of the evidence and disseminating the findings to further add to the evidence base.

Academic Leader for the Audiology Discipline, Dr Neethie Joseph, said ‘practice philosophy’ was a growing area of interest in the field.  She said in terms of thinking and research, attending the seminar was important because it would shed light on how to make their assessments and interventions relevant, effective and current when working with people who have hearing loss.

Although the focus was on EBP in SLP, with examples from the field of augmentative and alternative communication and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, the concept was relevant to all health professionals.    

Participants at the seminar comprised Audiologists, Occupational Therapists and Speech-Language Therapists, Educational Psychologists, undergraduate and postgraduate students - including Psychiatry postdoctoral student, Dr Andrew Tomita, who said he attended the seminar in order to expand his knowledge and see how EBP could be applied to his area of research interest which is Mental Health Services among people with schizophrenia. 

Third-year SLP students, Ms Shanice Moodley and Ms Ashley King, said they looked forward to their Honours year in 2016 where they would be more involved in research. They felt it was important to attend such seminars as they presented new knowledge that would be useful for their careers in the near future.

Lunga Memela