Enhance practice with evidence-based excellence for physiotherapists and other allied health professionals

Evidence-based healthcare begins with formulating precise clinical questions and accessing high-quality research to inform practice decisions. However, challenges arise when there is a lack of understanding of study design features and difficulties navigating the vast volume of published articles.

The Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) is crucial in indexing evidence to guide physiotherapy practice. An analysis of 1.3 million PEDro searches revealed that only 50% of searches include sufficient critical elements of a clinical question. In contrast, 4% utilise features like truncation to enhance search efficiency, and 13% contain errors such as improper use of Boolean operators. Additionally, many healthcare professionals and clinical researchers need help identifying high-quality research due to a poor grasp of research methodology.