Clinical Evidence: a useful tool for promoting evidence-based practice?

Opinions elicited using a standardised questionnaire delivered either by mail or during educational or professional meetingsTwenty percent (n = 1350) doctors participated the study. Most of them found CE's content valid, useful and relevant for their clinical practice, and said CE can foster communications among clinicians, particularly among GPs and specialists. Hospital doctors (63%) more often than GPs (48%) read the detailed presentation of individual chapters. Twenty-nine percent said CE brought changes in their clinical practice. Doctors appreciated CE's nature of an evidence-based information compendium and would have not preferred a collection of practice guidelines.Overall, the pilot initiative launched by the Italian Ministry of Health seems to have been well received and to support the subsequent decision to make the Italian edition of Clinical Evidence concise available to all doctors practising in the country. Local implementation initiatives should be warranted to favour doctor's use of CE.While there is a wide consensus that information on the effectiveness of health care interventions should be, as much as possible, evidence-based, it is common experience that many important questions doctors face in clinical practice do not have such information[1].Moreover, research on health services and quality of care have consistently demonstrated that the availability of good quality information is an essential yet insufficient condition for enhancing doctors' adherence to evidence-based practices[2]. Some have argued that, in order to be usable, information should be credible and independent from commercial interests, relevant and applicable in clinical practice and be delivered within a context (i.e cultural organisational, etc.) that favours its adoption and implementation.Some ten years ago the Cochrane Collaboration took the challenge of producing, maintaining and disseminating the results of high quality systematic reviews of the effects of health care i