The implementation of new clinical evidence in clinical practice: Exploring the role of education

Good health(care) is important. Many studies are performed that aim to improve healthcare. However, it is known from literature that the implementation of results of these studies (clinical evidence) into clinical practice is often slow and only partially successful. This results in patients not always receiving the most optimal care. Reasons why the uptake of clinical evidence is sub-optimal, include lack of time and lack of knowledge of healthcare professionals, an overload of innovations based on clinical evidence, and improvements inapplicable to specific context or patient populations. Education might play a role in the implementation of clinical evidence (in the form of an intervention or method) in healthcare practice. We use Grol's implementation model to investigate our main research question: ‘how can education programs facilitate the implementation of new clinical evidence into clinical practice’. We focus our study on two steps in this implementation process: 1) the impact of education on clinical practice and 2) the uptake of clinical evidence in educational practice.
In this thesis we provide evidence that change in practice can be achieved through education. With a tailored educational program we are able to overcome barriers for implementation in practice experienced by healthcare professionals, like the lack of time to search and study new evidence and the lack of knowledge to interpret the evidence. Since such barriers exist, summarizing and presenting evidence using educational programs is a powerful method to implement new evidence.