RESPONSE DISC

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is essential for advanced nursing practice. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) states that advanced-practice nurses should be equipped with the skills to identify practice problems and apply evidence within their practice (Smith & Bryant, 2019). Utilizing EBP in nursing practice ensures that we provide patients with tested and proven interventions that are beneficial. EBP is a nursing approach to problem-solving that involves consciously and intentionally applying the current agreed-upon “best” evidence to patient care (McEwen & Wills, 2019). EBP is a process that involves identifying a clinical problem, performing thorough literature searches for relevant information about the problem, critically evaluating the evidence found and deciding on appropriate interventions (McEwen & Wills, 2019). Through patient care data, clinician expertise, and patient preferences and values, advanced practice nurses can deliver the highest quality of care and provide the best patient outcomes (Fineout-Overholt et al., 2011).

While EBP enables advanced practice nurses to implement safe and effective care, there is some drawback to EBP. One barrier to EBP is that some healthcare organizations do not provide sufficient resources for nurses to implement EBP (Gray et al., 2017). The scarce recourses could be the product of several factors, including heavy workloads and inadequate time to make research-based changes, limited funding, and minimal rewards for providing evidence-based care to patients (Gray et al., 2017). Another drawback to EBP is that EBP guidelines can lead to a “cookbook” approach in which healthcare professionals assume they have expectations to follow guidelines within their practice (Gary et al., 2017). While guidelines are helpful and often applicable to patient situations, not every patient will fall into the broad category, and their individual patient factors should be considered in their care. And yet another barrier to EBP may be the advanced practice nurse’s education on EBP. While most advanced practice nurses are provided with an opportunity to learn about EBP and complete projects, they often are not given the opportunity to disseminate their outcomes to nursing academia and the healthcare community (Humbles & Jones, 2019). Advanced practice nurses must strive to perform EBP projects and do their best to disseminate their research and findings into their communities.

References

Fineout-Overholt, E., Williamson, K., Gallagher-Ford, L., Melnyk, B., & Stillwell, D. (2011). Following the evidence: Planning

for sustainable change. The American Journal of Nursing, 111(1), 54-60

Gray, J.R., Grove, S.K., & Sutherland, S. (2017). Burns and Grove’s the practice of nursing research: Appraisal, synthesis, and

generation of evidence (8th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Saunders Elsevier

Humbles, P., & Jones, S. (2019). Faculty and students find a niche in scholarship: Teaching strategies to disseminate

scholarly evidence-based practice projects. ABNF Journal, 30(4), 109-112

McEwin, M., & Wills, E. M. (2019). Theoretical basis for nursing. (5th ed.) Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer Health

Smith, T., & Bryant, P. (2019). Evidence-based practice: A hands-on learning experience for

advanced practice registered nurse students. Journal of Nursing Education, 58(10), p.

613. doi:10.3928/01484834-20190923-12DISCUSSION