Evidence-based psychosocial interventions are often required for use by behavioral health organizations serving children, youths, and families; however, professionals entering the workforce may not be prepared to meet these demands. To address this concern, barriers to workforce training and preparation for implementation of evidence-based…

Interprofessional health-care models have been largely recognized as a critical component of effective and efficient health-care provision. While many health professions have established methods of exposing their students to interprofessional health models, social work has been slow to join in on this educational movement. In an effort to provide…

Social workers have an ethical obligation to the consumers and communities they serve to draw on practice-relevant research evidence in planning and executing interventions. A model for using evidence in social work practice is proposed, which rests on a foundation of competence in the common factors of helping relationships. The model integrates…

This article adds to the growing body of literature on the use of evidence-based practice (EBP) in social work. Specifically, it examines a 9-hour EBP educational model designed to prepare MSW students for appropriate decision-making strategies in working with multicultural client populations. The model places emphasis on identification and…

The federal government increasingly expects child welfare systems to be more responsive to the needs of their local populations, connect strategies to results, and use continuous quality improvement (CQI) to accomplish these goals. A method for improving decision making, CQI relies on an inflow of high-quality data, up-to-date research evidence,…

Although some academic scholars have called for adoption of evidence-based practice (EBP) as a unifying model for social work education and practice, controversies with the EBP approach for the social work profession still need to be examined. Some of the limitations of EBP to be recognized and addressed before recommending broad changes within…

This article makes specific suggestions for teaching evidence-based practice (EBP) in the master's-in-social-work (MSW) curriculum. The authors use the model of EBP as it was originally conceived: a process for posing empirically answerable questions, finding and evaluating the best available evidence, and applying that evidence in conjunction…

This article offers a multidimensional framework that broadens current approaches to "best practices" inquiry to include (1) the perspectives of both the consumers of services and professional practitioners and (2) a value-based critique. The predominant empirical approach to best practices inquiry is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of…