Nursing Research and Evidence-Based Practice


Posted April 16, 2021 by robertcooper

The use of evidence-based nursing practices is becoming more important in the provision of quality nursing care. The use of empirical research in nursing practice has become a gold standard of quality and efficiency.

 
The use of evidence-based nursing practices is becoming more important in the provision of quality nursing care. The use of empirical research in nursing practice has become a gold standard of quality and efficiency. Despite the growing body of research evidence in all fields of nursing practice, clinical nurse practitioners encounter numerous barriers on their way to quality care improvements. These barriers are often related to the nature of the organizational environment as well as nurses' and supervisors' willingness to act as facilitators in translating research evidence into practice.
The use of oxygen in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has always been one of the most pervasive issues in our clinical setting. Many nurses tend to believe that the administration of oxygen to patients with COPD "eliminates their hypoxic drive", making them physically dependent on nurses . Consequently, a thorough analysis of evidence was performed to prove or deny the relevance of administering oxygen to COPD patients. An evidence-based practice was implemented, which relied on the empirical evidence that oxygen is a vital element of nursing care for patients with COPD. Among other nursing approaches used with COPD patients, the administration of oxygen was the only aspect of care based on evidence.
Unfortunately, the organizational environment often becomes the most serious barrier to translating evidence into practice and delivering effective evidence-based results. Organizational environment (or context) remains an indispensable element of the evidence-based models or frameworks available to nurse. One of the principal barriers to implementing evidence in nursing practice is "having insufficient time on the job to implement new ideas". In other words, many nurses have to spend their shifts working with dozens of patients, with little or no time left for the analysis and subsequent optimization of the caring practices based on available research evidence. Certainly, this barrier could be easily overcome, had the supervisors organized nurses' work in ways that would allow them devoting more time to research and evidence. Simultaneously, even in the presence of effective leadership support and balanced work schedules, translating evidence into practice would not be possible without nurses themselves being strongly motivated to develop evidence-based models of work. This is what Kitson et al. call "facilitation" a technique of support used by people to help change other peoples' habits and attitudes to work. Similarly to leadership support and environmental context, facilitation exemplifies an essential component of the existing frameworks used by nurses to implement research into practice.
Facilitation is probably one of the most promising approaches to evidence-based practice in nursing since the role of the facilitator is to help other people understand how and why they should change to achieve the desired practical result. In the situation when nurses do not have enough time to devote to evidence-based research, facilitation may entail the provision of quality support to relieve the burden of primary workplace obligations on nurses or, at the same time, the development of more balanced schedules to give nurses more time for research activities. Simultaneously, not all organizations have standard policies or procedures to help implement research into practice. According to Polit and Beck (2008), research evidence should be further integrated with other information, such as practical experience and clinical knowledge of the problem. In our case, the tasks were based solely on the evidence available to nurses due to the absence of any standard procedures to guide the administration of oxygen to COPD patients. The tasks were based on the research obtained from the public studies available through scholarly databases, which were searched by nurses to reinforce the presence of empirical study results in the most important daily practices.

About the author

Robert Cooper specializes in writing academic papers on educational topics. He is a writer at Case Study Writing Service Canada https://ca.123helpme.org/articles/do-my-case-study/
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Last Updated April 16, 2021