Implementing evidence-based practice
Samantha Chanel De Vera
Posted Date
Jun 16, 2022, 3:27 PM
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Implementing evidence-based practice (EBP) is essential for ensuring high-quality health care at minimum cost. Although all nurses are responsible for implementing EBP at an individual patient level, nurse practitioners as clinical leaders have additional responsibilities in leading and collaborating with transdisciplinary teams to implement EBP across patient groups and embed practice change into routine care(Clarke et al., 2021). This form of practice is essential for nurses as well as the nursing profession as it offers a wide variety of benefits: It helps nurses to build their own body of knowledge, minimize the gap between nursing education, research, and practice, standardize nursing practices, improve clinical patient outcomes, improve the quality of healthcare, and decrease healthcare costs. Thus, clinical decision-making by nurse practitioners should be based on the best and most up-to-date available research evidence. Evidence-based practice is a clinical decision-making process in which clinicians use theory-derived, research-based knowledge to inform their decisions about care delivery. Consideration of individual needs, preferences, and resources is also included(Steinberg, 2017). Few clinicians have the time to consistently read medical journals, identify relevant new research, and critically appraise new studies to determine if they should be incorporated into one’s practice. “Push” information resources are resources that send content out to their users on a regular basis(Steinberg, 2017). Other ways to integrate evidence-based inquiry are attending conferences or even being part of an organization that has continued education regarding EBP. EBP strategies allow nurse practitioners and other health care providers to translate research findings into clinical practice. With efficient literature-searching skills and applying formal rules of evidence in evaluating research findings, providers can use existing scientific knowledge in their clinical practice for each patient. Hence, this can improve patient experience, improve population health outcomes, and decrease health care costs(Clarke et al., 2021).
References
Clarke, V., Lehane, E., Mulcahy, H., & Cotter, P. (2021). Nurse’s practitioner implentation of evidence-based practice into routine care: A scoping review. Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, 18(3), 180–189. https://doi.org/10.1111/wvn.12510
Steinberg, D. I. (2017). Principles of evidence-based medicine and quality of evidence. In S. C. McKean, J. J. Ross, D. D. Dressler, & D. B. Scheurer (Eds.), Principles and practice of hospital medicine (2nd ed., pp. 143–159). McGraw-Hill.