NUR-530 Evidence-Based Nursing Practice

1. What is Evidence-Based Nursing?

Evidence-based nursing is a process that integrates the best available evidence gathered through scientific research to guide nurses or nursing care. It enables health practitioners to address health care issues from a more evaluative and qualitative approach as opposed to handling the issues subjectively. Evidence-based practices bring together clinical expertise, patient values and external clinical evidence obtained from systemic research in the making of the decision about a patient’s treatment or care. Talking about patient’s values is that, each patient will come with individual encounters, their personal preferences, concerns, and expectations. A clinician should incorporate this information into the decision making. Through this approach patient care has improved with more consistent positive outcomes because the current best evidence is used in deciding the care of an individual patient Hoffmann, T., (Bennett and Del Mar, 2013).

2. Useful and Valuable Sources of Evidence for Practice

Clinicians are posed with several challenges such that other than just getting the information, they have to evaluate its relevance, quality, and validity. What I consider as the most useful and valuable sources of evidence for practice is specialized textbooks. Books take two forms, texts in traditional style and books on CD ROM disks. Two main reason or aspects make books so useful for practice. Firstly, books are invaluable when it comes to addressing specific informational needs to clinicians. Despite the fact that a book might be old, facts about the gross anatomy, specific disease characteristics, basic principles and mechanism do not often change. Secondly, books provide a summary of new and complex topics and further categorizes issues in the context of other related areas of knowledge (Melnyk and Fineout-Overholt, 2011).  

References

Hoffmann, T., Bennett, S., & Del Mar, C. (2013). Evidence-Based Practice Across the Health Professions-E-Book. Elsevier Health Sciences.

Melnyk, B. M., & Fineout-Overholt, E. (Eds.). (2011). Evidence-based practice in nursing & healthcare: A guide to best practice. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.