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Creating Clinical Questions Using PICO (#7)

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PICO is a tool that you can use to help you to create a clinical question. This type of question applies to the assessment of interventions used for specific patient groups.

  • Patient – who is the patient or patient group? What is their condition / disease? What are the patient characteristics, such as gender or age?
  • Intervention – what is the intervention or treatment?
  • Comparison – what is the intervention being compared against? For example another treatment, a placebo or nothing
  • Outcome – what outcome is expected to change and is being measured?

Once you have identified the different elements you can then formulate your question more clearly. This will help you to identify the keywords you will need to use in your search strategy.

Coloured buttons representing the elements of PICO
Coloured buttons representing the elements of PICO

If you would like to practice creating PICO questions you can try our Using PICO Quiz. To learn more about how to breakdown your question, complete our etutorial Identify Your Question.

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