The Place of Evidence in the Context of Turkey Practice Nursing and Its Criticism

Purpose:

This paper presents the level of evidence-based nursing practices in Turkey.

Methods:

The foundation for the work includes the authors recently published book, which includes a literature review, research on evidence based nursing in Turkey.

Results: The first baccalaureate nursing education in Turkey was initiated in 1955 and nursing was accepted as a scientific discipline then. From this date on, nurses started to show interest to research. With the opening of doctoral and master programs in nursing in 1972, nurses started to perform occupational research studies and present them in national and international scientific meetings. Nursing research made a very slow progress in the years of 1960-1980. It can be said that studies in those years were usually done by the academicians in nursing schools for the purpose of academic improvement and most of those studies were far away from the real problems faced in the field of practice. In the beginning, studies could not serve the purpose of creating the information that is needed in reality and that is identified as the heart of nursing. A gap was generated between practice (what is nursing?) and theory (what should be nursing?). In our country, attempts of nursing education focus more on nurse managers and educators rather than the researcher. In the 1990s, several attempts were provided in order to relieve the Turkish nursing research studies from individualization and to organize them systematically. For example, in 1992, the “Nursing Research and Education Centre” was established within the American Hospital in Istanbul. In Turkey, evidence-based nursing practices was first mentioned in 2000 in an international conference by Platin with his presentation “Evidence- based nursing practices are not applied in our country, why?”. Most of the nursing practices are based on the traditional perceptions, unsystematic studies and opinions of the authority. In addition, most of the studies done are far away from the real problems occurring in the practice settings and they cannot meet the needs of practice. For evidence based practices, nurse researchers should do researches that are appropriate for practice.

 In Turkey, research education usually takes part in the third year of baccalaureate education in the nursing schools. In my university, the research course prepared with the purpose of helping the students to gain Evidence-Based Practice skills is given in their syllabus with an integrated approach being spread to the 4 years of study.

The attention being paid to research in our country is also increasing day by day. In the area of medicine, “Evidence-based medicine association” was established in 2008 by doctors. However; there are not enough and clear data about the place of nursing research results in clinical practice and there is not still any centre that evaluates the articles published about nursing in terms of the level of evidence.

We need to improve the evidence-based practicing approach, do researches that will be practiced in clinics, create the necessary mechanisms in order to evaluate the evidences of the researches and send the results to the nurses.

Conclusion:

Research topics should be determined from the experiences and silent information of clinical nurses. To work toward the real problems encountered in the field of application provides easier integration of obtained evidences to the application. Evidence-based practice topics should take more space in postgraduate training programs, this understanding should be gained by nurses. Managers should provide research opportunities to the nurses through institutional arrangements, should review facilitative arrangements for the use of research.