Evidence-based Practice Unites Us: A Framework for Interdisciplinary Training and Practice
Most individuals with disabilities exhibit therapeutic needs in a variety of domains such as communication, education, and motor skills. Although traditionally human services have been provided in isolation, interdisciplinary services to address a variety of therapeutic domains have been gaining traction. Given this recent shift toward interdisciplinary service delivery, it is necessary that pre-service professionals receive effective training in interdisciplinary collaboration. One of the major goals of evidence-based practice is to narrow the research to practice gap, ensuring that practitioners have access to and use the best available research when making clinical decisions. Another goal is to ensure effectiveness of treatments by considering the client’s specific characteristics, values, and preferences to enhance the impact of the treatment. Nearly all human service professions ascribe to evidence-based practice and require practitioners to maintain contact with relevant treatment research and adapt and modify treatments using one’s own clinical expertise, professional judgment and the knowledge of the client. An underutilized benefit of evidence-based practice is fact that the major tenants are consistent across most human service disciplines. In this paper, we present a brief overview of evidence-based practice from the perspective of a variety of human service disciplines whose practitioners commonly work collaboratively on interdisciplinary teams. Given there is striking overlap between each discipline’s evidence-based practice definition and activities, an evidence-based practice framework has the potential to unite professionals from different disciplines and guide the training of interdisciplinary professionals. The use of a common framework such as evidence-based practice can offer practitioners increased access to shared knowledge that should ultimately improve the effectiveness of interdisciplinary services for individuals with disabilities.