PICO(T) stands for Patient/Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome, and Time Frame.
Including a Time Frame is always optional.
PICO(T) is often tricky for students to understand, so here's a further breakdown of each part with examples.
Patient/Population
What are the most important characteristics of the patient or population you're interested in for the purposes of your research? These characteristics can be the categories we'd commonly think of like race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc., but can also include things like users of a particular website, people with certain diagnoses, patrons of a service, etc.
While it's important to be precise, it's also possible to be too precise. You'll be able to find many studies about Black single mothers in America, but you won't find as much research about Black single mothers in Milwaukee who are also Nursing students at Alverno. You will always have to generalize your population at least a little bit to find relevant research, but we'll talk more in Step 4 about how you can narrow back in on more specific populations.
Intervention
What treatment, service, or procedure are you researching? This can be a drug, a kind of therapy, a website design, changing the location of a service desk, adding new language to signage, changing operating hours, etc.
This is the part of the PICO(T) question that covers what you are directly changing about the work you're doing. If it helps, you can think of this as your independent variable.
Comparison
What are you comparing your intervention to? This is usually going to be the way things are currently done, so if you're considering changing where a desk is located, the comparison would be the current location of the desk. If you're considering trying a new drug therapy for a patient, the comparison is whatever treatment the patient is (or is not) currently receiving.
This can be the trickiest part of PICO(T) to include when searching for articles because it can be pretty hard to find the perfect studies that had your exact current conditions and used the exact intervention you're looking to use. If those studies exist, fantastic, you should definitely use them, but it can be very helpful in some cases to search for information about your comparison separately from information about your intervention.
For example, lithium used to frequently be the first drug given to patients presenting with symptoms of bipolar disorder. We've since developed new drugs that are safer and more tolerable to patients than lithium and most clinicians have moved away from prescribing it, but some clinicians still prescribe it as a first line treatment.
A clinician using evidence based practice to potentially make the switch to recommending a different drug might have trouble finding studies that directly compare the effectiveness of lithium and the new drug.
Instead, they might look for studies about the effectiveness of the new drug (Intervention) and look for separate studies about the effectiveness of lithium (Comparison,) then compare the results across the two types of studies.
A Comparison doesn't need to be included in a PICO(T) Meaning question.
Outcome
What are you trying to achieve with your Intervention? This could be improved patient satisfaction, higher library book circulation rates, more clicks on your website, fewer people asking navigational questions at service desks, better management of a patient's symptoms, etc.
Sometimes it's easy to get your Intervention confused with your Outcome. Keep in mind that the Outcome is the change you're hoping to see, but isn't something you have direct control over - in other words, your dependent variable. If it's something you are directly changing, it's an Intervention, and if it's something that changes as the result of something you did, it's an Outcome.
Time Frame
Again, you don't always need to include a time frame in your PICO(T) question, only when it makes sense to.
A real world and currently relevant example of the Time Frame part of a PICO(T) question would be how long a person with COVID-19 is able to spread the virus to other people.
