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Introduction
To highlight and advance clinical effectiveness and evidence-based practice (EBP) agendas, the Institute of Medicine set a goal that by 2020, 90% of clinical decisions will be supported by accurate, timely and up-to-date clinical information and will reflect the best available evidence to achieve the best patient outcomes.1 To ensure that future healthcare users can be assured of receiving such care, healthcare professions must effectively incorporate the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes required for EBP into education programmes.
The promotion of EBP requires a healthcare infrastructure committed to supporting organisations to deliver EBP and an education system efficient in supporting healthcare professionals in acquiring EBP competencies.2 To this end, healthcare education programmes must effectively implement curricula that target these competencies.3 To facilitate this, the Sicily consensus statement on EBP provides a description of core knowledge and skills required to practise in an evidence-based manner and a curriculum that outlines the minimum requirements for educating health professionals in EBP.2 Initiatives such as the European Union Evidence-Based Medicine project4 and EBP teaching programmes for educators facilitated by Oxford (Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine) and McMaster Universities provide support in advancing the EBP agenda within healthcare education. Over the past two decades, more than 300 articles have been published on teaching evidence-based medicine alone and in excess of 30 experiments have been conducted to measure its effects.5 Recent reviews3 6 evaluating the adoption of evidence-based recommendations for teaching EBP however point to poor uptake of existing resources available to guide EBP education.