Evidence-Based Project, Part 2: Advanced Levels of Clinical Inquiry and Systematic Reviews
The growth of travel nursing has grown in recent years because of the increase in demand for healthcare services Faller et al., (2018). Understanding the role of travel nurses (TRN’s) and how the travel nursing business has become its own nursing specialty is essential to identify the impact TRN’s have on the facilities where they work. With this in mind, I chose to propose the following question. Does utilizing travel nurses have an impact on the patient experience?
When we consider the formulation of a PICOT question, the proposed question fits the criteria. Understanding each of the components of the PICOT question can offer a distinctly clear question (Melnyk & Fineout-Overholt, 2018). The Population of interest is travel nurses. The Intervention or issue of interest is the quality of care provided by TRN’s. The Comparison of interest will be addressed by comparing data between TRN’s and full-time staff. The expected Outcome is that there will be research pertaining to TRN’s contribution to healthcare excellence. A Timeframe of one week will be sufficient for the review.
A broad search was conducted using Walden library using the words Travel Nursing which brought up 983 articles. The date range was changed to 2016-2021, which reduce the articles to 169. Using the Boolean terms (Library of Congress n.d), quality of care was added to the search parameter reducing the articles to 5; however, these articles did not specifically look at TRN’s. Similarly, travel nursing and patient quality of care were used as search parameters. Only three articles were found using those criteria, and none of the articles related to travel nursing. Therefore, all other search terms were eliminated, leaving only travel nursing.
A search of the CINHAL and MEDLINE databases combined was used using the same search terms, revealing no difference in results; there were fewer results. A search of ‘Travel Nursing’ in Science Direct was inconclusive to appropriate studies. Interestingly when leaving the date range open, many more studies were available, indicating that more recent research understanding the impact of utilizing TRN’s must be undertaken.
Whilst there were articles pertaining to travel nursing and patient care, there were severely limited studies directly related to travel nursing and the quality of patient care. Four articles were chosen based on the travel nursing criteria and relating to the quality of the patient experience with the last five years.
References
Faller, M., Dent, B., & Gogek, J. (2018). The ROI of Travel Nursing: A Full-Cost Comparison of Core Staff Pay Rates to Travel Nurse Bill Rates. Nursing Economics, 36(4), 177–181. ProQuest. https://doi.org/https://www-proquest-com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/nahs/docview/2096469984/363EF201D2C64880PQ/1?accountid=14872
Library of Congress. (n.d.). Search/Browse Help - Boolean Operators and Nesting: LC Catalog (Library of Congress). Catalog.loc.gov. https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/ui/en_US/htdocs/help/searchBoolean.html
Melnyk, B. M., & Fineout-Overholt, E. (2018). Evidence-based practice in nursing & healthcare: A guide to best practice (4th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer.
This is an interesting topic to study. Here is some advice on your PICOT question
The Population of interest is travel nurses (this is ok)
The Intervention or issue of interest is the quality of care provided by TRN’s. (change this as you cannot actually manipulate it. A standard is for all nurses to give quality care. You need to select some intervention that would be imposed such as a specific orientation or a group for collaboration etc
The Comparison of interest will be addressed by comparing data between TRN’s and full-time staff. (no, the comparison is travel nurses NOT HAVING the intervention your suggest.
The expected Outcome is that there will be research pertaining to TRN’s contribution to healthcare excellence. (no, you need to state a particular outcome you expect to see as a result of the intervention suggested.
Time: A timeframe of one week will be sufficient for the review. (this depends on the idea)