Cognition in Clinical Practice: The Clinician and the Patient

Abstract

Copyright: © 2013 Jorgensen LE. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. As a clinically trained audiologist and researcher, I feel that it is important to always provide the best services to my patients and provide the most accurate information for my students. This starts with teaching patients and students to demand evidence based practice. Evidence based practice is a term that has been used over and over in clinical practice. We expect our students and clinicians to apply research to every day clinical decisions in the care of patients in all professions. To be able to apply the most recent and accurate evidence to clinical practice, clinicians must have access to research findings. Many clinicians are not associated with organizations (e.g. universities) that purchase subscriptions to journals; therefore, they must purchase these articles on their own, rely on non-peer reviewed trade journals or rely on the available abstract for the evidence for clinical practice. This leads to frustration and inaccurate clinical application of information. Also, with younger patients coming to receive services, many of them are demanding access to information prior to their appointment to become more informed consumers. Open-source journals allow anyone to access the information necessary for best clinical practice; this includes clinicians, researchers, students and patients. If everyone has access to the most recent evidence, in turn, it will better improve the researcher, clinician patient relationship and improve the services we provide.