Background: Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is becoming an accepted educational paradigm in medical education at a variety of levels. It focuses on identifying the best evidence for medical decision making and applying that evidence to patient care.
Methods: Three EBM journal clubs were developed at the West Virginia University School of Medicine. One was for senior medical students, another for residents, and the third for primary care faculty members. In each, the sessions stressed answering clinical questions arising from actual patient-care issues. The curricular structure and development of the journal clubs are described. Participants anonymously evaluated aspects of the journal clubs regarding their educational value with Likert scale questions.
Results: Faculty members and residents generally gave high evaluations to all aspects of the EBM journal clubs. Student evaluations were more mixed. For each of the evaluation questions, the student means were lower than those of faculty and residents. However the differences reached statistical significance only in the responses to the usefulness of the sessions in understanding the medical literature (P < 0.01). Residents and faculty rated the EBM sessions more favorably than grand rounds or the resident lecture series.
Conclusions: The establishment of evidence-based medicine journal clubs is feasible, and learners seem to value the sessions. More developed learners may gain more from the experience than those earlier in their medical education.