Sandra Sparks
Chamberlain College of Nursing
NR 351: Transitions to Professional Nursing Fall 2010
Introduction During the 1980’s, the term “evidence-based” medicine surfaced to describe the approach that used scientific evidence to determine the best practice. Evidence-based practice is a process that entails reviewing and instilling the most reliable and updated research in patient care. The goal of evidence-based practice is to provide the highest quality care while being most cost efficient. It is a process based on the accumulation, interpretation, and integration of derived evidence. This best available is applied to improve the quality of patient care. Consumers of health care are becoming more informed and ready to challenge authorities in health care, consequently, expectations of health care provisions continue to rise, as people are encouraged to take responsibility and become actively involved in health care decisions. When intervention is needed, expectations are high, with the most appropriate and best treatment demanded (Berenholtz & Provosost, 2003). Review of Professional Nursing Literature There are several stages that must be completed before evidence based practice can be incorporated into final practice. The first stage is generally known as the knowledge generating stage. In this stage, knowledge in discovered through traditional research and scientific inquiry. Summarizing the knowledge is done in stage two. At this point in the process the research is synthesized into meaningful and useful information. This information results from multiple studies which will give more credible results. The third stage results in the transformation of this evidence into practice recommendations and then integrated into practice. The goal of transformation is to provide useful tools to
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