LibGuides: Evidence-Based Practice Research in Nursing: Formulate a Clinical Question: PICO

PICO

PICO is a popular framework for formulating clinical questions, especially those relating to therapy (or intervention) effectiveness. It’s used to develop a well-built clinical question to aid in creating a search strategy. It helps identify searchable aspects of a situation in which a patient or population has a certain condition, and the outcome of interest is related to a therapy or intervention.

PICO stands for:

P – Populations/People/Patient/Problem
I – Intervention(s)
C – Comparison (if any)
O – Outcome

Example:

Premature infants in the NICU face challenges related to their physiological and behavioral development due to their early arrival. As a NICU nurse, you and your team are interested in exploring non-pharmacological interventions to support these infants' growth and development while reducing their stress and discomfort. There is a growing interest in music therapy as an intervention, as it has shown promise in other healthcare settings. You're interested in finding out if there is evidence in the study literature to support using music therapy in this situation.

For this scenario, these are our PICO components:

Population- premature infants in the NICU

Intervention- music therapy

Comparison- no comparison (we are not comparing music therapy to any other intervention)

Outcome- Improvement in physiological and/or behavioral responses

Using PICO, we can formulate a focused, answerable question:

"In premature infants in the NICU (P), does the implementation of music therapy (I) lead to significant improvements in physiological and/or behavioral responses (O)?"

PICO Worksheet and Search Strategy for CINAHL
This form is adapted from Purdue University Libraries.

PICO Tool for PubMed Searching
A quick way of searching your PICO question in PubMed. Enter the population and intervention, comparison and/or outcome (if appropriate).You can also select the type of publications you are interested in such as RCTs or systematic reviews. May be useful for scoping searches to find key studies and to get an idea of the potential size of the evidence base. Not recommended for fully comprehensive searches for systematic reviews as the searcher has no control over or evidence of the search strategy for reporting purposes.

Brown, D. (2020). A Review of the PubMed PICO Tool: Using Evidence-Based Practice in Health Education. Health Promotion Practice, 21(4), 496–498.