Evidence-based practice in splinting the injured hand.

Evidence-based medicine has been practised in the early 1990s in the Western countries and its model has aroused interests in the Asian countries including Hong Kong in the late 1990s. The need for evidence-based practice was called upon by Sackett and his colleagues 14-16 mainly because of the exponential growth of new evidence of treatment effectiveness. There is a great demand for clinicians to search for the best evidence and to incorporate into the daily practice so as to ensure the best quality and standard of treatment. This paper is to review the development and process of evidence-based practice in the area of hand splinting for our local clinicians. Some major problems were identified in the delivery of clinical evidence-based practice, and suggestions have been made to overcome these problems with a view in supporting its model in the local clinical field.