Healthcare providers worldwide are embracing evidence-based practice (EBP) as a means of providing patients and their families with the best quality care. Yet the quality chasm will only be bridged if practitioners are empowered with the skillsets needed to conduct EBP. As one of the essential goals of Meridian Health’s model of care process is to cultivate greater staff accountability through empowerment and clinical decision-making, we sought to provide nurses on the MOC units with the essentials of EBP. This presentation will discuss how the foundations for EBP are supported on MOC units. In guided sessions, nurses identified areas of concern in their practice and then prioritized their questions according to importance to clinical outcomes, topics of interest and support of organizational priorities. Once these topics were generated, EBP teams, comprised of APNs, educators and staff nurses, attended workshops with national EBP experts to develop skills in critically appraising the evidence. Between visits with our national expert consultants, the EBP teams have cultivated their EBP skills with the assistance of Meridian nurse researchers, managers and librarians. Three MOC units have active EBP teams investigating best practices related to pain control, and prevention of complications such as urinary tract infections, deep vein thrombosis and pressure ulcers. The goal of greater staff accountability will be realized as practice changes are implemented based upon the nurses’ critical appraisal of the best evidence.

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See more of The 17th International Nursing Research Congress Focusing on Evidence-Based Practice (19-22 July 2006)