Evidence-Based Practice In Physical Therapy Profession

Introduction Evidence-based practice is a patient/client-focused approach, and it is an essential part of the physical therapy profession. It enables the physical therapist practitioner to use current best evidence in making a decision that will impact patient care. Formulating a clinical question is an important first step in evidence-based research and with the advancement of technology, the physical therapist can use multiple electronic medical databases simultaneously to search for pertinent journals and articles using varieties of keywords, filter and phrases to name a few to answer the clinical question formulated.

I have been working in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) and curious about the safety and feasibility of physical therapy early mobilization in this environment. Therefore, I formulated my clinical question using the Patient, Intervention, Comparison and Outcome (PICO). I used the PICO model as recommended by the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM, 2014) to formulate my clinical question: For this reason, my focused clinical question was "Is early mobilization program safe or detrimental to ICU patients recovering from a complicated medical condition?"
In my quest to find the answer to my clinical questions, I ventured into the medical databases of PubMED and CINAHL, located in the Utica College Online Library (Utica College,