What are Best Practices?
“Best Practices” is a very popular concept and some alternative/approximate terms include best practice, effective solution, promising practice and innovative practice. A practice can mean different actions, such as a policy, activity, intervention, approach, or program.
How can we identify Best Practices?
The identification of Best Practices that can be adapted to other environments is crucial to inspire and guide practices related to diabetes care/treatment. In addition, the goal of identifying best practices in diabetes care is to create value, not wasting resources reinventing the wheel, learning from others and adapting to the new context.
Best Practices is a valuable source of practice-based, “tested and proven” evidence on interventions implemented in real-life environments that can complement the results of scientific evidence.
Several methods for selecting Best Practices are described. One of the proposals (by Eileen Ng and Pierpaolo de Colombani) defines and conceptualizes elements of a Best Practice in public health based on an extensive systematic review of secondary literature.
The proposed structure includes eight criteria:
- relevance
- Community participation
- collaboration of stakeholders
- ethical soundness
- replicability
- eficacy
- efficiency
- sustainability
Thus, scientific evidence – usually from empirical studies – and evidence based on practice are two main sources of knowledge. Both should be considered in decision-making as they provide information that complements itself.
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