Evidence based practice (EBP) is vital across every level of health care for ensuring the effective care of patients and consumers.1,2 The conduct and publication of systematic reviews is part of the ongoing push to turn this ideal into a reality. One of the aims of a systematic review is to bring all available evidence on a particular clinical question together for ready access. With the growth of available research literature, the conduct of systematic reviews is imperative, particularly as it has been thoroughly demonstrated that clinicians have limited time to pursue general research and study.3 A properly conducted and fully reported systematic review is long, however, frequently spanning more than a hundred pages, and with clinicians, on average, being unable to spend more than two minutes searching for the answer to a specific clinical question,4 this will often prove unsuitable for providing evidence to inform clinical decision making. As such, it has been established that the evidence supplied to clinicians for practice at the "point-of-care" needs to be in the form of succinct summaries.5

Numerous EBP point-of-care resources have been developed to provide databases of searchable evidence summaries on specific clinical topics to facilitate retrieval, synthesis, organization and utilization of research.6 They have been recognized as being a vital next step from systematic reviews for the provision of clinically relevant, regularly updated, pre-appraised summaries of evidence for practitioners.5,7,8 However, while we have set standards for the conduct and reporting of systematic reviews - adhered to at a greater or lesser extent by review authors, referees and journal editors9-12 - how evidence summaries should be developed is comparatively non-standardized. Work has been undertaken to, at the least, investigate just how evidence-based these resources truly are. In 2010, Banzi and coworkers published a study where they identified, described and evaluated 18 online EBP point-of-care resources.6 After assessing coverage of medical knowledge, editorial quality and content quality, they concluded that all online EBP point-of-care resources had room for improvement in all of these areas (editorial policy, evidence-based methodology, volume and breadth) to better enable users to confidently make informed decisions.

More recently, two similar works have been published, each assessing over 20 EBP point-of-care resources.9,10 Encouragingly, both groups concluded that the evidence-based methodology and editorial quality of EBP point-of-care resources appeared to be improving, with analyses performed by Kwang et al.9 (who were the same group that performed the original review), demonstrating that average quality was significantly higher than when first assessed. Interestingly, one domain that was shown to have significantly improved, evidence-based methodology, included whether or not the use of systematic reviews was prioritized as a source of evidence over other sources.13 However, it remained true that the quality of these resources varied greatly, with the majority being rated as only moderate. Interestingly, although much of the attention paid to the importance of EBP point-of-care resources has focused on their use by physicians,2,13,14 Campbell and colleagues found that amongst the top quartile of resources ranked by quality, three of five were originally established for, or currently targeted at, providing evidence to inform nursing practices.15

It has been acknowledged for some time that not all primary research is conducted to a high standard. There is growing awareness that the same is true for systematic reviews. The studies referred to here show that similar consideration is being given to the final step in the "translation" of primary research findings into resources usable by clinicians at the point-of-care. As such, when accessing or acquiring resources for EBP at the point-of-care, practitioners, policymakers and administrators alike should take the time to consider the evidence behind their evidence.

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