Evidence-based medicine among physicians working in selected public hospitals in eastern Ethiopia: a cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) is the process of systematically locating, searching, evaluating, and using contemporaneous research findings as the basis for clinical decision making. The systematic review showed that there is a considerable gap between what is known in the systematic research evidence and what happens in practice. Thus, the purpose of this study is to assess knowledge, attitude, practice and perceived barriers to EBM among physicians working in public hospitals in eastern Ethiopia. METHODS: An institutional-based cross-sectional survey was conducted from April 1–June 8, 2017. Simple random sampling with proportional allocation was used. A total of 137 physicians was included in the survey. The data were collected by interview. Data were coded and entered to EpiData 3.1 then exported to and analyzed by using IBM SPSS statistics 21.0. RESULTS: Physicians were aware of and used HINARI (22.6%), Cochrane (29.8%) and PubMed/Medline (37.9%) EBM electronic databases. The majority, (88.7%) physicians have a good attitude to EBM but only (32.3%) integrate it into clinical practice. Ability to retrieving evidence, evaluating the outcomes of the EBM practice implemented and difficulty in understanding research reports were significantly associated factors. CONCLUSIONS: The attitude of the physicians towards EBM was virtuous, but knowledge of EBM and practice of integrating new evidence in healthcare service were really insufficient. Relatively, the EBM implementation is low when compared with many studies. To obviate this, the stakeholders need to have a strong commitment to design a strategy for promoting physicians in implementing EBM to their day to day clinical decision-making process.