Empowering Nurses to Implement Evidence-Based Practice through Instructional Design

Staff nurses have been mandated to conduct and use research in their pracice as part of a Magnet application. However, many nurses are reluctant to begin the process, because they are not familiar with the abstract nature of the research process, let alone, the application of research into practice (Shivnan, 2013). In fact the word, research, can cause nurses to experience anxiety at the very term. Those same nurses may have extensive clinical experience and can identify patient problems without difficulty. The challenge for nurses who do have research experience and evidence-based practice skills is to identify methods to merge the clinical experience of staff nurses with research and evidence-based practice skills. Empowering nurses can lead to their ability to merge research and evidence based practice (Huddleston, 2014). This presentation is an example of how staff nurses were empowered to apply the Iowa Model and the Rogers model into their clinical nursing practice (Schmidt & Brown, 2015). Through collaboration with an instructional designer, learning objects were created to convert the abstract nature of research and evidence based practice into a concrete form for relaxed learning of the process.

References:

Huddleston, P. (2014). Health work environment framework within an acute care setting. The Journal of Theory Construction and Testing, 18(2). 50-54.

Schmidt, N.A. & Brown, J.M. 2015). Evidence-based practice for nurses: Appraisal and application of research(3rd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett Learning.

Shivnan, J.C. (2011). How do you support your staff promote EBP? Nursing Management, 42 (2), 12-14.