 Hi, it's Carrie. I'm a health professions librarian at Towson University's Albert S. Cook Library. If you're a nurse, a nursing student, or a nursing instructor, and you need to formulate an answerable question for an assignment or project, you might feel a little overwhelmed about how to start. In this video, I'm going to give you an overview of the PICO framework. The PICO framework can help you put together an answerable clinical or epidemiological question. The first part of the framework is P. P can stand for patient, problem, or population. How would you describe the patient, population, and or the setting that you're interested in? The second part of the framework is I. I can stand for intervention or E for exposure. Is there a drug, therapy, or intervention that you're interested in? In epidemiological topics, you may be interested in an environmental agent or a chemical. The third part of the framework is C, comparison, or control. If not for the intervention, what is the standard of care, or what's the alternative therapy? Finally, let's think about the outcome. It's okay if you can't define this yet. You may not have the answer to this without knowing more about your topic, but you may be interested in a specific outcome. Sometimes outcomes are as simple as a reduced length of stay in a hospital, reduced pain, increased mobility, decreased mortality, and so on. We'll see some examples in just a moment. So in this incredibly specific and straightforward sample question, we want to know if in patients with a puncture wound of the hand, our population, does the application of a bandage, our intervention, compared to no bandage, our comparison, result in faster wound healing, our outcome. Now let's look at a few more examples. In patients with postoperative nausea and vomiting is aromatherapy as effective as the standard of care in reducing nausea? Can you guess who our population is? That's right, patients with postoperative nausea and vomiting. What's our intervention? Aromatherapy compared to the standard of care. In the outcome, reducing nausea. Let's do another one. Is obesity a risk factor for increased mortality in patients with diabetes? Our population? Patients with diabetes. Our exposure in this case is obesity, patients who meet the criteria for obesity. We don't necessarily have a comparison unless you wanted to infer that the comparison is patients who do not meet the criteria for obesity. And our outcome is mortality. Last one. Is ibuprofen more effective than acetaminophen in the treatment of headaches? Our intervention and our comparison are clear. Our intervention is ibuprofen. Our comparison is acetaminophen. Depending on how you frame it, both our population and our outcomes lie in the part about headaches. Our population is persons with headaches. Our outcome is reducing the pain of a headache. If you're struggling with a topic, try the PICO framework. When you start to look for literature for your topic, you can translate the major elements of your PICO, usually the patient problem or population and the intervention or exposure pieces, into an effective literature search. I hope that you were able to learn something new from this video. Leave a comment down below and don't forget to subscribe to my channel if you find it helpful. Librarians are here to help and I would be thrilled to hear from you.