%0 Journal Article
%T Undergraduate medical students¡¯ perceptions, attitudes, and competencies in evidence-based medicine (EBM), and their understanding of EBM reality in Syria
%A Fares Alahdab
%A Belal Firwana
%A Rim Hasan
%A Mohamad Sonbol
%A Munes Fares
%A Iyad Alnahhas
%A Ammar Sabouni
%A Mazen Ferwana
%J BMC Research Notes
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1756-0500-5-431
%X The authors evaluated education of evidence-based medicine through a two-day intensive training course that took place in 2011. The course included didactic lectures as well as interactive hands-on workshops on all topics of EBM. A comprehensive questionnaire, that included the Berlin questionnaire, was used to inspect medical students¡¯ awareness of, attitudes toward, and competencies¡¯ in EBM.According to students, problems facing proper EBM practice in Syria were the absence of the following: an EBM teaching module in medical school curriculum (94%), role models among professors and instructors (92%), a librarian (70%), institutional subscription to medical journals (94%), and sufficient IT hardware (58%). After the course, there was a statistically significant increase in medical students' perceived ability to go through steps of EBM, namely: formulating PICO questions (56.9%), searching for evidence (39.8%), appraising the evidence (27.3%), understanding statistics (48%), and applying evidence at point of care (34.1%). However, mean increase in Berlin scores after the course was 2.68, a non-statistically significant increase of 17.86%.The road to a better EBM reality in Syria starts with teaching EBM in medical school and developing the proper environment to facilitate transforming current medical education and practice to an evidence-based standard in Syria.Innovation in information technology alongside massive increase in biomedical research has given rise to a relentlessly changing biomedical literature varying in quality and clinical relevance. This has led to the emergence of evidence-based medicine (EBM) as the new paradigm for medical practice [1].EBM is defined as the ¡°conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence.¡± [2] It involves integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence and use of individual patients¡¯ values and preferences in making clinical decisions about their care [3]. The te
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/5/431