Dental Hygiene & Assisting

Before you make a decision about a patient's care, you will want to review the available medical evidence.  Evidence is clinically relevant information that you must assess to determine its quality.

Let's imagine you do a search in a medical database and find an article related to your clinical scenario.

• In a very basic assessment, you'll want to make sure that you're looking at a scholarly article from a peer-reviewed journal.
• Next, you will want to evaluate the type of evidence that the article you found represents. This requires you to understand the levels of evidence, often described as a pyramid.

The video below will explain the difference between "unfiltered" evidence such as a research study, and secondary "filtered" evidence such as a systematic review, which systematically searches for, evaluates, and summarizes all of the published research on a given clinical question to form an overall recommendation.