Asking Focused Clinical Questions

• Background (this page)
• Educational Prescriptions (RTF) - A table for different question types.

One of the fundamental skills required for practising EBM is the asking of well-built clinical questions. To benefit patients and clinicians, such questions need to be both directly relevant to patients' problems and phrased in ways that direct your search to relevant and precise answers. In practice, well-built clinical questions usually contain four elements, summarised below.

One of the benefits of careful and thoughtful question-forming is that the search for evidence is easier. The well-formed question makes it relatively straightforward to elicit and combine the appropriate terms needed to represent your need for information in the query language of whichever searching service is available to you.

Once you have formed the question using the PICO structure, you can think about what type of question it is you are asking, and therefore what type of research would provide the best answer.