Paper
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Infusing Evidence-Based Nursing Practice into a Teaching Medical Center: Celebrating Incremental Change
Priscilla Sandford Worral, PhD, RN, University Hospital, University Hospital, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY, USA
Literature reporting survey results identifying barriers to and facilitators of evidence-based practice almost invariably includes "the organization" or "the setting" as belonging in the first category. Nursing administrators and managers are not unaware of these findings, nor are they ignoring the importance of evidence-based practice as a means for improved patient care and a professional nurse envirnoment. Accepting the commitment to create and maintain an organizational infrastructure that will support staff-nurse driven patient care decisions and interventions based on practice requires patience, persistence, and expenditure of resources that already are scarce in the current healthcare environment. This session describes the development and continuing evolution of an organizational infrastructure to support staff-driven evidence-based practice and nursing research conduct in one 350-bed teaching medical center. Specific strategies to enable nurses to increase comfort and competence with computers, literature, the language of evidence-based practice, and sharing their findings with colleagues on the health care team will be discussed. Viewed at one point in time, these strategies and consequent changes seem incremental. Viewed over the ten years since inception of the Nursing Research Program, these changes are to be celebrated.
Back to Staff Nurse-Driven Evidence Generation and Use: Supporting the Process
Back to Evidence-Based Nursing: Strategies for Improving Practice
Sigma Theta Tau International
July 21, 2004