- Jennifer Tieman1,
- Raechel Damarell1
- Flinders University1
2015
Excerpt
Background
Evidence based Practice assumes that health professionals can effectively retrieve relevant published research evidence. However, little is known of the searching skills of palliative care clinicians.
Aims
• To investigate how palliative care clinicians construct a broad search for palliative care literature and
• To quantify search effectiveness by testing retrieval rates in a set of relevant articles.
Methods
Palliative care clinicians (n=37) developed a search in PubMed. Search construction was analysed by an expert librarian. Retrieval rates for each search were calculated using the test set of articles. A survey on attitudes to searching was also completed by participants.
Results
Analysis of the individual searches showed basic technical errors and indicated conceptual issues in topic formulation. The mean retrieval rate of the individual searches was less than 25%. However, survey results indicated that over 75% of participants believed they would find more than 50% of the articles.
Discussion
This study highlights the issues health professionals face in effectively retrieving palliative care literature. Health professionals may be better served by using validated searching tools such as the palliative care search filter to identify relevant literature and evidence for their practice.