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Defining a clinical question in terms of the specific patient problem aids the searcher in finding clinically relevant evidence in the literature.
The PICO Model is a format to help define your question.
| P | Patient, Population, or Problem | How would I describe a group of patients similar to mine? |
| I | Intervention, Prognostic Factor, or Exposure | Which main intervention, prognostic factor, or exposure am I considering? |
| C | Comparison or Intvervention (if appropriate) | What is the main alternative to compare with the intervention? |
| O | Outcome you would like to measure or achieve | What can I hope to accomplish, measure, improve, or affect? |
Consumers' health information produced by the National Library of Medicine that is authoritative and up to date.
Produced by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLINEPlus provides health professionals and consumers information that is authoritative and up to date. MEDLINEplus has extensive information from the National Institutes of Health and other trusted sources on over 500 diseases and conditions. There are also lists of hospitals and physicians, a medical encyclopedia and dictionaries, health information in Spanish, extensive information on prescription and nonprescription drugs, health information from the media, and links to thousands of clinical trials.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publish several journals that may be helpful in your search for evidence.
Publications include:
The CDC is also an excellent resource for statistics on U.S. health.
Open access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors. The following links will allow you to search open access materials available from libraries, governmental resources, etc.
Your organization may subscribe to one or more of the Nursing Evidence resources:
PubMed contains abstracts of research articles. There are some full text articles available, but not many, and you don't want to bias your evidence search by limiting to only items readily available through PubMed.
How do you get full text articles? Start with your nearest library. If your employer / organization does not have a library: