EBP Mentors in Action in a Real World Clinical Setting to Improve Care and Outcomes

Purpose:

Evidence-based practice mentors have been shown to be critical to effectively integrating and sustaining evidence-based practice and decision-making in clinical organizations

Methods:

An exemplar of EBP mentors in action in a large, complex academic organization to improve care, outcomes, and cost will be presented.  This healthcare organization had been building a cadre of EBP mentors over the past two years and when faced with a quality challenge, they called upon the knowledge and skills of their EBP mentors to find the best, evidence-based solutions and implement action plans to improve practices and outcomes related to this practice challenge.  

Results:

The evidence-based quality improvement initiative designed and led by EBP mentors will be presented. The processes involved, including; accurately articulating the clinical challenge that involved many stakeholders, developing the PICOT question to drive the search for best evidence, the search for evidence to answer the question, the critical appraisal and synthesis of the body of evidence to underpin the practice change recommendations, and finally the implementation  and embedding of two innovative evidence-based practice change interventions as well as the outcomes of the projects will be described.

Conclusion:

The highlights and strengths of the systematic EBP approach in addressing clinical challenges will be discussed and the return on the investment made by this organization to develop a cadre of EBP mentors will be highlighted.