Promoting Question-Building Skills to Enable Nurses to Succeed in EBP

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is best understood as a process—an approach to decision making.  Mastery in knowledge, skills, attitudes, and self-efficacy in applying what is known is essential for the process to work. Our findings suggest a widespread underestimation of some fundamental skills required to begin the decision making process for aligning practice with evidence. Until recent times, the field has assumed that these skills sufficiently exist within the natural skill sets of every nurse, which has advanced the false perception of EBP as a straightforward endeavor. 

The purpose of this paper is to address the fundamental process of developing a question. The skill of developing a guiding question and modifying that question to elicit relevant information for making an evidence-based practice determination is a skill that must be cultivated within the discipline of nursing. While the skill of developing a guiding question is perhaps latent in the cognitive abilities of the individual nurse, it must be developed, sharpened, and exercised to serve the evidence-based decision making process (EBDM). In this study, insights about nurses’ knowledge and skills needed for formulating a question are drawn from self-rated assessments of nurses’ knowledge, skills, attitudes, self-efficacy and practice environment related to evidence-based decision making. The data were provided by a group of nurse volunteers from diverse practice settings, locations, and roles. The insights shed light on self-reported deficits and have led us to develop some representative strategies for nurturing the question building skill within nursing staff. 

At the completion of this session, the participant will be able to 1) describe factors identified in the study findings that influence question building skill in everyday practice, and 2) identify strategies to connect nurses with needed knowledge and strategies to develop a guiding question in clinical practice.