Generating and Translating Evidence to Simultaneously Impact Nursing Education and Patient Care With Undergraduate Research

Undergraduate nursing programs often focus on using external evidence to inform decisions at the patient level, which is vitally important to achieving the evidence-based practice (EBP) goals established by the Institute of Medicine (IOM, 2001) and corresponding expectations set forth by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN, 2008) and the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN; Cronenwett et al., 2007). However, to prepare undergraduate students to take an active role in driving evidence-based change in practice, it is essential to give students an opportunity to be mentored in generating and translating evidence to inform patient care at the systems level.

This presentation will focus on the outcomes and experiences associated with an undergraduate honors research program, as an innovative way for academe and practice to collaboratively prepare students for EBP and promote quality improvement for patients at the same time. Students will present how they expanded their EBP knowledge by identifying a clinical problem and then working collaboratively as a team, similar to a task force in practice, to gather and analyze data. Further, students will share how they learned to evaluate results in context of the clinical setting and external evidence, and develop implications by working collaboratively with peers, faculty, and practicing nurses. Students will present findings from their research on perioperative hypothermia and associated complications, as they speak directly to the significance of practice problem and the process of learning to use evidence to impact patient care at the systems level.

Perioperative hypothermia is an ongoing problem in practice, especially for female patients (Cunha Prado, 2015), older than 60 years of age (Torossian et al., 2015), administered combined anesthesia (Cunha Prado, 2015), undergoing a total knee or hip replacement (Frisch, Pepper, Rooney, & Silverton, 2017), and/or a longer stay in the operating room (Cunha Prado, 2015). The occurrence of perioperative hypothermia can have a significant impact on patient recovery as this has been associated with serious complications such as coagulation dysfunction, delayed recovery from anesthesia, impaired wound healing, and surgical site infection (Ying, et al., 2014).

Students will describe how results and corresponding implications of their study have informed policy change and education to impact patient care. Finally, students will describe how the experience impacted their value for EBP. Faculty will present how to coordinate successful projects with one or more honors students, focusing on topics in nursing education and practice. Further, faculty will discuss the many roles of the mentor in facilitating a positive experience from conceptualization to dissemination of results. Guidelines, which promote consistent expectations for faculty and students in relation to learning, research, dissemination, and support, will also be presented.