"Evidence based practice" is a phrase we hear often in healthcare but actually putting evidence into practice can be challenging. For starters you don't know what you don't know, finding the evidence that is relevant to your practice can be as haphazard as stumbling across it on the internet or in a journal.  There is also the minefield of reliable evidence: can you trust the source? have you critically appraised it? is the evidence valid for your area of work? Finally once you have found and appraised the evidence the challenge then is to discuss this with your peers and your patients and actually put what you have learned into practice.  

This #WeMDT discussion is being held in conjunction with Cochrane UK and aims to explore evidence for everyday - how we find it, how we use it and how it impacts our practice.  Sarah Chapman (@SarahChapman30) from Cochrane UK writes: 

"At CochraneUK ( @CochraneUK ) we use social media to share evidence, most often from Cochrane reviews, in different formats and different levels of complexity, with the aim of making it accessible and useful to people making health decisions. We do this through blogs on http://www.evidentlycochrane.net, blogshots and other products across several social media platforms, and through tweetchats, most often with the wonderful WeCommunities!

Using the best available evidence to inform decisions is an essential part of evidence-based practice, along with clinical expertise and the patient’s preferences and values. 

We have four ‘Evidence for Everyday’ series, created for specific audiences: 

• Nurses #EENursing - VIEW HERE 
• Midwives #EEMidwifery - VIEW HERE 
• Allied health professionals #EEAHP - VIEW HERE 
• Patients/others making health choices #EEHealthChoices - VIEW HERE  

We called the series ‘Evidence for Everyday’ because we tend to focus on common topics and practices, but also because we think everyday practice should aim to be evidence-based.

When reliable evidence just isn’t there, perhaps we should think of it as ‘evidence-aware practice’! Being aware of gaps in the evidence is really important. There are many examples of clinical practice where something is done routinely, but for which the benefits and harms, and other factors, have not been established by reliable evidence. I’ve written more about that HERE

One of the things we most value being able to do, is to invite practitioners and patients to bring their experience and expertise alongside the evidence, in blogs and in tweetchats. We also host Students 4 Best Evidence @Students4BE where you can find useful resources like this library of evidence-based nursing resources, and read and reflect on blogs – or write them!

Social media is a great way to share (and find) evidence for practice as it reaches so many people.  Recently we used social media to share a newly updated Cochrane review, with high quality evidence, informing and supporting the recommendation in UK and international guidelines that peripheral venous catheters (PVCs) should be replaced only when clinically indicated rather than routinely - you can read about the impact of this HERE, but essentially we used a variety of social media approaches to bring relevant everyday evidence to healthcare practitioners. 

We’re always looking to improve what we do too, and if we can better understand what helps and hinders you in making your practice evidence-based, that will help us to make the series more useful to you."

Questions we will be exploring during this tweetchat:

• What was the last piece of evidence you used to inform your practice?
  
• How easy is it to find and understand up-to-date evidence?
• What are the barriers to making your practice evidence-based?
• What helps / could help you to bring more evidence into practice?
• What could help to bring evidence into practice as part of decision-making with patients and colleagues?
• What one piece of evidence do you feel would help with your daily practice?