INTRODUCTION: The interest in applying scientific knowledge to physical therapy practice has grown in recent years. It has been emerged in health care the Evidence Based Practice (EBP), which is a scientific movement that looks for ways to integrate individual experiences of the physical therapy practice with the best available clinical evidence from systematic research. However, little is known about whether physical therapists (PTs) know and apply the EBP in their clinical practice. OBJECTIVE: Therefore, this study aims to verify whether physical therapists are able and skillful on searching scientific literature and if they base their clinical practices on scientific literature. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A descriptive study, with quantitative approach was performed. Sixty-seven PTs, who work in the Greater Florianópolis district, responded a modified online questionnaire from the Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) Questionnaire. RESULTS: The population of the interviewed PTs was mostly young, females with age range between 20 and 29 years old. Possibly because their age, 73.1% of respondents completed their PT degree within the last five years and 71.6% have no post-graduation courses recognized by the Crefito. The PTs alleged to have a positive attitude about EBP and were interested in learning or improving their skills required to implement EBP. They agreed with the need to increase the use of scientific evidence in their daily practice. CONCLUSION: The lack of time was the most important barrier to the use of EBP, which was followed by the difficult in generalizing the findings of the scientific literature for patient populations, and deficient sources of information.
Physical therapy; Professional profile; Evidence-based practice
