What Is Evidence-Based Nursing: Difficulties and Advantages

Evidence nursing is a problem-solving approach to clinical decision making within a healthcare facility. It integrates the use of scientific evidence with the available experimental evidence as it studies both internal and external influences on practice thereby encouraging the use of critical thinking in the application of the evidence to individual patient population or a system.

The evidence-based nursing model consists of three phases: -

Practice

The nurses should develop and come up with practice questions for where they are based at in their facilities.

Evidence

Conduct research, collect, synthesize the internal and external sources of findings acquired.

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Nurses should therefore create and implement an action plan, evaluate the findings and publicise.

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This approach enables nurses to manage new literature and technology which may result in improved patient outcomes. Most of the time spent by nursing students was used in designing care plans, doing reviews in pathophysiology, memorizing interactions such as pharmacology, etc. Even though doing this has been useful, it can never be the only way of preparing nursing practice students.

Although critical thinking skills are required, sole reliance on books alone will not improve a nurses’ skill in the current clinical fast paced environment. A lot of evidence-based methods are important for students to learn and become independent. Evidence-based practice requires total emphasis on observation, reliance on literature and the ability to summarize and apply information read to day-to-day operations.

Nurses skills are enhanced as it also allows them to expand their clinical experience and training with current research. It allows them to look for, assess and apply the knowledge in their clinical situations.

Recent studies have provided evidence to show that nurses provide care according to the way they had learned in their respective nursing schools. It was seen that they rarely used articles, research reports and even the healthcare libraries for reference as this clearly displayed how outdated their knowledge is as practice based on such knowledge does not translate into quality patient health care.

Evidence-practice allows for a critical strategy to be used in order to ensure that the care provided is up to date and that it also reflects the current research evidence. The above practice is important to nursing schools as there are greater results in patient’s outcomes. Most of these patients get better within a lesser period, it also contributes to the science of nursing immensely. Evidence-practice, also, increases the confidence in decision making as policies and procedures are current and include the latest research. Evidence-based nursing is vital in the achievement of the Magnet Recognition Program.

Implementation of these practices will be easily followed by nurses if they refer to already-developed clinical practice guidelines. Many expert groups have started developing guidelines that will be used by healthcare providers and patients in making informed decisions regarding care.

Findings have, however, emerged that there are barriers that prevent nurses from implementing the research practices in their day-to-day operations. Most of the reports brought forward by them include the lack of knowledgeable mentors who would guide them on how to go about. Insufficient time to conduct their research has also proved to be an issue as most of them have twelve hour shifts on the schedules making it hard for them to comply. Others are: -

The above barriers can, however, be solved through efforts focusing on the integration of research and practices and increasing the continued use of journals, research articles that become easily accessible.