Response 3

One post is written in response to fellow learners’ post between 100-150 words. Responses are substantive insightful and contain at least one reference.

Delphi Technique in Developing Nursing Guidelines

Research informs professionals on the impact of specific intervention measures in addressing observed issues. Nurse practitioners rely on evidence-based practice to implement solutions that improve the quality of care in their work environment. In addition to research-based insight, national practice guidelines highlight essential steps in providing care. They focus on diverse areas of care delivery and are applied by all nurses. The Delphi technique is an appropriate method of developing such guidelines because of the participants involved in the research. DNP-prepared nurses are most likely to contribute to developing nursing guidelines through their specialized expertise in specific fields of nursing practice.

The Delphi technique primarily includes a discussion of opinions presented by experts in a particular field. Tetreault et al. (2019) define clinical practice guidelines as statements that guide the decisions of healthcare providers. Such guidelines in the nursing practice would facilitate nurses’ decisions in their interaction with patients and colleagues in their practice. Subject matter experts involved in the Delphi technique ensure that guidelines focus on critical content points on the issue in question (Jacob et al., 2017). Wurz et al. (2021) highlight the consensus reached by participants in Delphi technique studies as pivotal to its application in developing nationally recognized practice guidelines. Thus, the Delphi approach develops expected guidelines by using expert opinions on nursing practice issues.

Expert and specialized opinions involved in developing national guidelines make them better for practice application than stand-alone articles. Experts’ ability to refine the guidelines to expected levels of critical thinking within the nursing practice is one primary strength of the Delphi technique (Jacob et al., 2017). Further, the quality of research published in some modern journals has received significant criticism (Smith et al., 2018). Oermann et al. (2018) term some practices by journal publishers as predatory and questionable professional practice contributions. National guidelines offer the best solutions to practice issues since participants involved in developing them would understand the issues that they attempt to address. Unlike some evidence developed from research, their guidelines would be of unquestionable quality.

Healthcare professionals currently use many practice guidelines. For example, pain management in long-term care settings guidelines highlight the steps necessary for attending to patients presenting with some form of pain-related discomfort (Pain Management, n.d.). A DNP-prepared nurse can influence developing such guidelines by providing insight into theoretical views related to patient management issues. Such practitioners would have specialized in issues such as geriatric care and have expert information on the most common pain issues that they experience. In addition, the expert views and discussions with other DNP-prepared nurses within the same field would help reach expert-based consensus on issues that research may not have addressed.

In conclusion, the Delphi technique is an impactful method in nursing practice for its contribution to developing essential practice guidelines. Participants in research processes involving the technique need to be experts in the field of practice for which the guidelines are developed. DNP-prepared nurses are suitable experts since they possess academic qualifications that make them experts in their respective fields. Failures of modern studies associated with poor quality research efforts and extensive commercialization limit the effectiveness of standalone research in addressing critical healthcare practice challenges. Expert opinions involved in developing national guidelines through the Delphi techniques make such principles efficient enough in addressing specific challenges observed in nursing practice with reliable accuracy.

References

Gelling, L. H., Haigh, C., Barnason, S., Allan, H., Penny, K., & Jackson, D. (2018). Transparency in the reporting of nursing research. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 27(3-4), 475-477. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.14212.

Jacob, E., Duffield, C., & Jacob, D. (2017). A protocol for the development of a critical thinking assessment tool for nurses using a Delphi technique. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 73(8), 1982-1988. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13306.

Oermann, M. H., Nicoll, L. H., Chinn, P. L., Ashton, K. S., Conklin, J. L., Edie, A. H., Amarasekara III, S., & Williams, B. L. (2018). Quality of articles published in predatory nursing journals. Nursing Outlook, 66(1), 4-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2017.05.005.

Pain management in the long-term care setting. (n.d.) Guideline Central. https://www.guidelinecentral.com/summaries/pain-management-in-the-long-term-care-setting/#section-society.

Tetreault, L., Nater, A., Garwood, P., Badhiwala, J. H., Wilson, J. R., & Fehlings, M. G. (2019). Development and implementation of clinical practice guidelines: An update and synthesis of the literature with a focus in application to spinal conditions. Global Spine Journal, 9(1), 53S-64S. https://doi.org/10.1177/2192568219831689.

Wurz, A., McLaughlin, E., Lategan, C., Chamorro Viña, C., Grimshaw, S. L., Hamari, L., Götte, M., Kesting, S., Rossi, F., Van der Torre, P., Guilcher, G. M. T., McIntyre, K., & Culos-Reed, S. N. (2021). The international Pediatric Oncology Exercise Guidelines (iPOEG). Translational Behavioral Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1093/tbm/ibab028.