PICO(T) Form

CLINICAL QUESTION IN PICO(T) FORMAT

The purpose of this form is to assist clinicians in honing their skills to formulate clinical questions by submitting their question. If you are an educator who would like to use this as a teaching tool, please contact the CAEP Director, Ellen Fineout-Overholt. Step 1 of EBP is asking a clinical question in PICO format (see below). As a first step, formulating the clinical question can be challenging, but is the most important part of the EBP process, laying the foundation for the 4 subsequent steps. A clinical question that is searchable and answerable creates the context for integrating research findings, clinical expertise and judgment, and patient values and preferences. It also provides direction for the search strategy and what type of evidence is required to answer it.

PICO(T) FORMAT

SAMPLE SCENARIO:

A staff nurse on a step-down unit for cardiac surgery patients conducts monthly pain management interviews to determine how to improve patient outcomes. One month, contrary to previous reports, almost half of the patients recalled more pain immediately after surgery AND could recall their extubation experience. In seeking answers to this change in patients' pain experiences, the nurses learned that, without prior interdisciplinary dialogue, the anesthesiologists, in an attempt to reduce length of postoperative intubation, had changed their intraoperative and postoperative pain management protocol from fentanyl to morphine. The PICO(T) question that addresses this pain management issue in this practice situation could be: In adult cardiac surgery patients (P), is morphine (I) or fentanyl (C) more effective in reducing postoperative pain (O)