Article Text
Abstract
Fostering a culture of clinical effectiveness in healthcare is crucial to achieving optimum outcomes for patients. Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a cornerstone of clinical effectiveness. An EBP capacity-building project commenced in Ireland in 2016, in collaboration with the Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford. A key part of this project, reported here, was the development of a competency framework for education in EBP and clinical effectiveness to ensure responsiveness of education standards and curricula of healthcare professionals in this area.
Methods Following a review of national and international reports, professional guidance documents and empirical literature pertaining to clinical effectiveness education (CEE), a preliminary competency framework was developed. Stakeholder consultations were conducted over a 6-month period, which consisted of 13 focus groups (n=45) and included representatives from clinical practice, higher education and professional training sectors, regulator/accrediting bodies, the Department of Health (Ireland) and patient/service user groups.
Results An overarching interprofessional competency framework for CEE was proposed and included the following domains: EBP, quality improvement processes, implementation strategies and collaborative practice: a total of 16 competencies and 60 indicators.
Conclusion A competency framework for CEE for health and social care professionals is presented. It is intended that this framework will provide guidance to healthcare educators and regulators in the construction and revision of curricula, learning outcomes, teaching and assessment strategies, and graduate/clinician attributes.
- medical education & training
Data availability statement
Data are available upon reasonable request. Deidentified participant data are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author (e.lehane@ucc.ie). No commercial reuse of data.
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Data availability statement
Data are available upon reasonable request. Deidentified participant data are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author (e.lehane@ucc.ie). No commercial reuse of data.
Footnotes
Contributors Conceived and designed the study: EL, JH, NOR and EOT. Scoping review procedures (including data screening, extraction and synthesis): EL, HA and SOC. Clinical teaching expertise and focus group recruitment: MC, COT, HL, NM, FB, MH, DB, CB, EH, FH, JMcV, NOR and LS. Focus group data collection and analysis: PLW, HA, EL, JD and SOC. Research report appraisal, drafting and dissemination: All. Manuscript appraisal and final approval: All.
Funding This work was commissioned by the Clinical Effectiveness Unit, Department of Health, Ireland.
Competing interests NOR was employed by the Department of Health at time of funding.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.