Compare methods

	Evidence-Based Practice Process	Treatment Fidelity Assessment
Field	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1996	2004
Originator	Evidence-based medicine tradition (Sackett et al.); translated to social work by Gambrill and others	NIH Behavior Change Consortium Treatment Fidelity Workgroup (Bellg et al.)
Type	Structured process for integrating evidence, expertise, and client values in practice decisions	Assessment of the degree to which an intervention is delivered as intended
Seminal source	Sackett, D. L., Rosenberg, W. M. C., Gray, J. A. M., Haynes, R. B., & Richardson, W. S. (1996). Evidence based medicine: What it is and what it isn't. BMJ, 312(7023), 71–72.	Bellg, A. J., Borrelli, B., Resnick, B., Hecht, J., Minicucci, D. S., Ory, M., Ogedegbe, G., Orwig, D., Ernst, D., & Czajkowski, S. (2004). Enhancing treatment fidelity in health behavior change studies: Best practices and recommendations from the NIH Behavior Change Consortium. Health Psychology, 23(5), 443–451.
Aliases	EBP Process, Evidence-Based Practice (Process Model), Five-Step EBP Process, Evidence-Informed Practice Process	Treatment Integrity, Intervention Fidelity, Implementation Fidelity, Fidelity Monitoring
Related	4	4
Summary	The evidence-based practice (EBP) process is a structured, five-step way of making practice decisions by integrating the best available research evidence with professional expertise and the client's values and circumstances. Originating in evidence-based medicine as defined by Sackett and colleagues and translated into social work by Eileen Gambrill and others, it reframes EBP not as a fixed list of approved programs but as a transparent decision process — ask, acquire, appraise, apply, assess — that an individual practitioner carries out with and for a particular client.	Treatment fidelity assessment measures the degree to which an intervention is actually delivered as it was designed — covering adherence to prescribed components, the competence with which they are delivered, the dose received, and how clearly the intervention differs from other approaches. Codified for behavioral research by the NIH Behavior Change Consortium and framed conceptually by Carroll and colleagues, it protects the validity of intervention research and the integrity of evidence-based practice by ensuring that when an intervention is studied or implemented, what was named is what was done.