Background
* Evidence Based Nursing started with Florence Nightingale. A firm believer in knowledge-based practice, she was a systematic thinker and passionate statistician, who believed in using the best possible research to elevate practice on the shoulders of knowledge.
* Since then, the nursing profession has more recently provided major leadership for improving care through application of research findings in practice.
* According to the University of Minnesota, Evidence-based nursing is the process by which nurses make clinical decisions using the best available research evidence, their clinical expertise and patient preferences.
* To carry out EBN the following factors must be considered: * 1. sufficient research must have been published on the specific topic * 2. The nurse must have skill in accessing and critically analyzing research * 3. The nurse’s practice must allow her/him to implement changes based on EBN. * Undoubtedly, nurses need help accessing and analyzing research. In a recent study of 3000 licensed US nurses, more than half of those responding (53%) had never identified a researchable problem, almost half were unfamiliar with the term “evidence-based practice,” and 43% sometimes, rarely, or never read journals or books. Eighty-two percent had Internet access somewhere in their facility, but fewer than 50% of them had it where they could access it easily, such as on patient units or at the nurses’ station. Most of those surveyed do not search MEDLINE (55%), the majority (73%) does not search CINAHL, and almost 38% believe that their colleagues do not use research findings in the practice environment.
* Nursing practice leaves little time for applying EBN processes. The realities of decreased staffing and increased acuity mean most nurses spend most of their time caring for patients as best they can. There is no time to conduct
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