NR 439 Week 8 Graded Discussion Topic: The Evidence-Nursing Practice Connection
Purpose
This week’s graded topics relate to the following Course
... [Show More] Outcome (CO).
CO 1: Examine the sources of evidence that contribute to professional nursing practice. (PO 7)
CO 5: Recognize the role of research findings in evidence-based practice. (PO 7 & 8)
The Assignment
Improving patient care and outcomes is paramount to the practice of nursing. As we conclude our learning journey through our world of research and evidence-based practice, it is important to reflect upon your time spent in the course:
Think about nursing practice and describe one barrier that you feel prohibits nurses from engaging in EBP; share one strategy you could use to facilitate the use of evidence to help improve nursing care for patients.
Reflect back over your time in the course and describe how your thinking has changed about nursing research and evidence-based practice; describe one new learning during this course that you believe was the most helpful.
ANSWER
Under evidence-based nursing practice, nurses would utilize data in making accurate and informed clinical decisions, and also to monitor improvements and facilitate workflow. This helps in improving patient care and outcomes. For instance, the use of a Real Time Locator System (RTLS) helps in streamlining nursing and patient workflow by improving communication to minimize errors and inefficiencies that are critical to quality patient care and outcomes.
Thinking about nursing practice, I think that the delivery of consistent high-quality nursing services in the healthcare system is faced with huge challenges nowadays. The adoption and use of evidence-based practice (EBP) provides a reliable problem-solving approach which is based on the best available and valid evidence, hence promoting quality patient care, individual professional development, and reduced healthcare costs (Tacia et al., 2015). One of the barriers that prohibit nurses from engaging in EBP is lack of time and knowledge. Most nurses and clinicians often cite lack of time as one of the factors that hinder their adoption and proper implementation of EBP to achieve quality patient care. Also, lack of knowledge of uncertainty about the process involved in EBP implementation such as critiquing literature related to the nursing problem being addressed, and appraising it is also a huge barrier (Khammarnia et al., 2015).
One strategy that I could use to facilitate the use of evidence in improving the nursing care for the patients is engaging appropriate stakeholders. By engaging appropriate stakeholders when implementing EBP in nursing, nurses are able to build trust between themselves and the patients. Also, working with appropriate stakeholders enables the nurses to learn from their experience and provide positive inputs to the implementation of evidence-based practice (Khammarnia et al., 2015). This is because the involvement of these stakeholders helps in identifying the outcomes measures of the practice. Additionally, having a buy-in from the beginning through the involvement of relevant stakeholders helps the nurses in planning for better implementation of EBP.
Reflecting back over my time in this course, I believe that my thinking has changed significantly as far as nursing research and the use of evidence-based practice in nursing is concerned. During this course, I have learned that nursing research is important to nurses and healthcare professionals because it enables them to determine the most effective practices to improve patient care. Through nursing research, new information will always be coming to light and this information is used to respond to changes in the healthcare environment to improve patient care and outcomes (Stevens, 2013). Additionally, I have learned that EBP involves a thorough use of the current best research-based evidence to make accurate decisions about patient care. EBP is a problem-solving approach that integrates a healthcare professional’s own clinical expertise, a systematic search for the most relevant evidence to clinical questions and its critique, and patient values and preferences. At the end of this course, the one learning that was most helpful and will be important in my future career is the knowledge that EBP allows healthcare practitioners to evaluate clinical guidelines, research, and other information resources based on the quality of the findings, and apply the results of this evaluation to nursing practice.
References
Khammarnia, M., Haj Mohammadi, M., Amani, Z., Rezaeian, S. and Setoodehzadeh, F. (2015). Barriers to Implementation of Evidence Based Practice in Zahedan Teaching Hospitals, Iran, 2014. Nursing Research and Practice, 2015, pp.1-5.
Stevens, K. (2013). The Impact of Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing and the Next Big Ideas. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing Vol. 18, No. 2, Manuscript 4.
Tacia, L., Biskupski, K., Pheley, A. and Lehto, R. (2015). Identifying barriers to evidence-based practice adoption: A focus group study. Clinical Nursing Studies, 3(2). [Show Less]