Comparison of residents’ approaches to clinical decisions before and after the implementation of Evidence Based Medicine course

Introduction: it has been found that the decision-making process in medicineis affected, to a large extent, by one’s experience, individual mentality, previousmodels, and common habitual approaches, in addition to scientific principles.evidence-based medicine is an approach attempting to reinforce scientific,systematic and critical thinking in physicians and provide the ground foroptimal decision making. in this connection, the purpose of the present studyis to find out to what extent the education of evidence based medicine affectsclinical decision making.methods: the present quasi-experimental study was carried out on 110clinical residents, who started their education in september, 2012 and finally 62residents filled out the questionnaires. the instrument used was a researchermadequestionnaire containing items on four decision-making approaches. thequestionnaire was used both as a pre-test and a post-test to assess the residents’viewpoints on decision making approaches. the validity of the questionnairewas determined using medical education and clinical professionals’ viewpoints,and the reliability was calculated through chronbach alpha; it was found to be0.93. the results were analyzed by paired t-test using spss, version 14.results: the results demonstrated that evidence-based medicine workshopsignificantly affected the residents’ decision-making approaches (p < 0.001).the pre-test showed that principles-based, reference-based and routinemodel-based approaches were more preferred before the program (p < 0.001).however, after the implementation of the program, the dominant approachesused by the residents in their decision making were evidence-based ones.conclusion: to develop the evidence-based approach, it is necessary foreducational programs to continue steadily and goal-orientedly. in addition, theequipment infrastructure such as the internet, access to data bases, scientificdata, and clinical guides should develop more in the medical departments.