PICO (alternately known as
PICOT) is
a mnemonic used to describe the four elements of a good clinical question. It stands for:
P--Patient/Problem
I--Intervention
C--Comparison
O--Outcome
Many people find that it helps them clarify their question, which in turn makes it easier to find an answer.
Use PICO to generate terms - these you'll use in your literature search for the current best evidence. Once you have your PICO terms, you can then use them to re-write your question. (Note, you can do this in reverse order if that works for you.)
Example:
Often we start with a vague question such as, "How effective is CPR, really?" But, what do we mean by CPR? And how do we define effective? PICO is a technique to help us - or force us - to answer these questions. Note that you may not end up with a description for each element of PICO.
P - our question above doesn't address a specific problem other than the assumption of a person who is not breathing. So, ask yourself questions such as, am I interested in a specific age cohort? (Adults, children, aged); a specific population (hospitalized, community dwelling); health cohort (healthy, diabetic, etc.)
I - our question above doesn't have a stated intervention, but we might have one in mind such as 'hands-only'
C - Is there another method of CPR that we want to compare the hands-only to? Many research studies do not go head to head with a comparison. In this example we might want to compare to the standard, hands plus breathing
O - Again, we need to ask, what do we mean by 'effective'? Mortality is one option with the benefit that it's easily measured.
Our PICO statement would look like:
P - community dwelling adults
I - hands only CPR
C - hands plus breathing CPR
O - mortality
From our PICO, we can write up a clearer and more specific question, such as:
In community dwelling adults, how effective is hands-only CPR versus hands plus breathing CPR at preventing mortality?