EBP Exchange – UMB School of Social Work

This 76 page, 2008 report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on Evidence Based Practice is an update of an earlier paper and worth the reading–even if you have seen the earlier version.  This version sticks with the earlier defnitiion that EBP is the integration of the best available research with clinical expertise in the context of patient characteristics, culture, adn preferences, also as per Sacket’s classic IOM definition.  They use the term Evidence Based Practice to refer to the entire enterprise of applying science to practice (see definition above) and uses the term Evidence Based Treatments (EBT) to refer to specific interventions. They don’t make decisions about which EBTs have strong enough evidence to justify the title but do refer the readers to many websites that have their own criteria for doing so.  They do endeavor to include a developmental framework. They discuss a concept that was not familiar to me, “Response to Intervention (RtI).  I quote at lengthe, here, from page 31,

The basic feature of an

RtI approach is the use of evidence-based interventions

implemented in a multitiered model of services, using

student outcomes in learning and behavior domains to make decisions about the need for subsequent and more intense interventions, including special education (National Association of State Directors of Special Education, 2005). Interventions used in this model have included both academic (e.g., direct instruction, peer-assisted learning strategies) and, less often, behavioral domains (e.g., second step, multisystemic family therapy). RtI as a model of mental health and educational services is the first federallyrecommended wide-scale preventive approach implemented in schools. Schools can serve students demonstrating early signs of learning problems and behavioral concerns without a designation of “special education” and with evidence-based prevention adn intervention”.  They do this while acknowledging that RtI does not have exensive research support, if underfunded, and not well integrated into general education!  So, this is truly a “promising practice” at best but one that the authors couldn’t help touting.

One other positive feature of this document is that they look at evidence based assessments which is an advance because we often think of assessments as something other than interventions but they are a key part of interventions and unless they are psychometrically sound they should be avoided as a waste of time and resources for clinicians and children, youth, and families.  They also provide a short discussion of evidence based treatment components including engagement components. THe final content is on dissemination and uptake and what we need to know about how information from research can best be transformed into practice changes.  A well-written, solid, hardly groundbreaking review, in all.  The pdf is below

http://www.apa.org/pi/cyf/evidencerpt.pdf