NUR 670

Rita S. Perez

Abstract

Research findings cannot benefit nursing or patients until they are disseminated, opened up to critique by others, and ultimately put into practice. Knowledge translation and dissemination are described almost universally in the EBP literature as an essential last step in any practice-change initiative or research project, as research knowledge that never gets published cannot affect patient care. This post compares three common formats for disseminating research findings. It then provides a dissemination plan to share the results of this course’s PICO question at the national level.

Disseminating Research Findings

Three methods to disseminate research findings

There are multiple routes available to researchers who wish to share their work. The three methods discussed here represent common routes, each reaching different audiences. Publication of research in a peer-reviewed journal is generally the cornerstone of any dissemination plan. It remains the primary way most scientists learn about new studies (Capili & Anastasi, 2024). If possible, researchers should choose a journal that is indexed in a database specific to their field (e.g., PubMed for health-related research), as this will increase the study’s visibility and allow future investigators to find it. Posting research to an open-access journal further increases the number of potential readers by eliminating subscription fees. However, researchers should beware of predatory open-access journals that claim to provide peer review but actually charge publication fees.

Another way to disseminate findings is through conferences. Presenting research at professional conferences provides researchers with the opportunity to share their findings with colleagues, receive feedback from experts in their field, and establish connections that may lead to future collaborations (Capili & Anastasi, 2024). Many conference presentations can even be uploaded to free hosting sites after the event to widen their audience. Researchers may also consider disseminating research through social media platforms. Platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter allow scientists to reach both healthcare professionals and the public without the limitations of journal subscription models (Capili & Anastasi, 2024). Publication in a peer- reviewed journal provides the highest level of scholarly rigor and permanence, but is typically slower and lacks interactive dialogue when compared with other dissemination methods. Presentation at a conference allows for expedient sharing of results and interactive discussion with clinicians and scientists, and can be an effective method for translating evidence for clinical practice. Social media can disseminate information the fastest, with the potential to reach the widest audience, which is ideal for raising awareness and directing clinicians to complete reports, but lacks scholarly permanence. These three modalities vary across reach, scholarly permanence, timeliness, and interactivity.

Plan to Disseminate the Results of Our Course PICO Question

This course’s PICO question is, “In adult psychiatric patients with depression and anxiety disorders (P), does the use of the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale during routine psychiatric evaluations (I), compared to standard clinical assessment without a structured screening tool (C), improve early identification of suicide risk and patient safety outcomes (O)?”. The C-SSRS is a suicidality screening tool that can function as either a standard or risk factor questionnaire. Use of this novel tool represents a departure from standard care, which traditionally consists of an unstructured clinical interview by mental health clinicians. Recent evidence has validated that C-SSRS improves screening for suicide risk compared to the standard of care. The C-SSRS screen version (triage version) is a 6-item questionnaire designed to detect suicide risk and determine the severity and immediacy of suicide risk. One validation study found the C-SSRS to be both valid and feasible in emergency, psychiatric, and general inpatient settings (Dillon et al., 2024).

Further evidence shows that implementing C-SSRS screening improved the identification of at-risk patients. Utilizing a large emergency department cohort in Sweden, researchers showed that increasing severity on the C-SSRS Screen was associated with both subsequent suicide and increased clinical management (Bjureberg et al., 2022). By contrast, a retrospective emergency department study found that universal screening with the C-SSRS altered the frequency and patient characteristics for whom psychiatric consultation was recommended. These results were substantiated by an additional study analyzing the psychometric ability of the Spanish version of the C-SSRS to discriminate between low, medium, and high-risk of suicide attempts across a large sample of adults. (Austria- Corrales et al., 2023). Researchers in Madrid took this one step further and found that implementation of the C-SSRS resulted in 34.95% of psychiatric emergency department patients being deemed moderate or high-risk for suicide when the screener was placed into participants’ charts. (Martínez Pillado et al., 2025).

My goal in disseminating this information is to promote consistent use of a standardized suicide-screening tool during routine psychiatric assessment of adults with depression and anxiety disorders. As shown by the research cited above, structured assessment improves the identification of at-risk individuals compared to an unstructured clinical interview. I believe that clinicians can easily adopt a short, validated screening tool as part of routine psychiatric assessment.

I plan to submit an abstract to the APNA 40th Annual Conference to be held October 28-31, 2026, in Phoenix, Arizona. APNA represents the national organization for psychiatric mental health nurses and boasts over 2,000 virtual and in-person attendees. Research, practice, and education presentations are accepted, and suicidality is explicitly listed as a topic of interest for submission (American Psychiatric Nurses Association, 2026). My audience of interest includes front-line psychiatric mental health RNs and APRNs. Additionally, nurse managers and educators represent key individuals who can affect changes to intake and assessment procedures. A poster presentation will allow the researcher and provider to discuss barriers to implementation (e.g., time per patient) and will enable interested parties to contact me directly for the tool. After

the conference, I will submit a brief manuscript to a psychiatric nursing journal so that these results remain accessible to clinicians.

Stacy Weiner

Abstract

The translation of research into practice depends not only on the quality of the evidence but also on ensuring that the findings reach clinicians and decision-makers who can act on them. This discussion examines three approaches to disseminating research findings relevant to psychiatric nursing practice: open-access repositories, professional digital and social media platforms, and public media engagement. Each strategy is evaluated based on its reach, credibility, timeliness, and potential to influence clinical practice and community awareness. This discussion is based on the clinical inquiry: In LGBTQ adolescents and young adults with depression and anxiety, does LGBTQ-affirming cognitive behavioral therapy, compared to standard cognitive behavioral therapy, improve depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and treatment engagement? The evidence suggests that identity-affirming, minority stress–informed CBT is more effective than conventional, culturally neutral approaches in improving treatment engagement and reducing symptoms among LGBTQ adolescents and young adults (Pachankis et al., 2023; Williams et al., 2021). Based on the available evidence, disseminating these findings through a state-level psychiatric nursing conference is recommended, as it provides an opportunity to reach PMHNPs and other advanced practice clinicians who are directly involved in delivering frontline mental health care. This discussion demonstrates how doctoral-level inquiry can extend beyond evidence synthesis to support mental health equity for LGBTQ adolescents and young adults.

Keywords: LGBTQ-affirming therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, minority stress, dissemination, knowledge translation, treatment engagement, psychiatric nursing.

Disseminating Evidence on LGBTQ-Affirming Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Research results obtained through a rigorous clinical research process have little practical

impact until they are made available to nurses. The process by which findings are shared outside the immediate context of research to larger professional and general audiences is called dissemination. This discussion compares three dissemination channels: open-access repository deposit, professional digital and social media dissemination, and public media engagement. It evaluates their strengths and limitations as strategies for disseminating evidence on LGBTQ- affirming cognitive behavioral therapy. Based on the evidence synthesized during this course, a dissemination plan centered on a state psychiatric nursing conference is proposed.

Approaches to Disseminating Research Findings

Placing research results in an open-access repository, such as an institutional database at a university or a preprint server, eliminates the barriers to cost and timeline that commonly exist between clinicians and new evidence. This approach enables publication of the results before or in parallel to traditional peer review, so that a study of LGBTQ-affirming CBT can be instantly identified by clinicians and researchers without institutional access to journals (Harkness et al., 2024). Repository deposit also provides a citable, permanent digital object identifier, so that findings can be recovered years after release. The main weakness of this approach is credibility: since preprints are not systematically peer-reviewed by all, some clinicians and health policymakers might not give repository-deposited results the necessary attention until a subsequent publication confirms the work.

Digital and social media platforms enable the rapid publication of findings to a self- selected, engaged professional community, rather than waiting until the next publication or conference cycle. By publishing summaries on academic platforms, such as ResearchGate, or posting main findings on LinkedIn with clinical hashtags related to LGBTQ mental health, psychiatric nurse practitioners and other behavioral health scholars with an active interest in LGBTQ mental health scholarship will be exposed to these findings (Pachankis et al., 2023). The second method also enables two-way communication, as clinicians may leave remarks, ask questions about the implementation, or even share results within their own circles, which are even farther-reaching than the first audience. The primary disadvantage of this approach is that no formal indexing is performed; social media presence can be easily forgotten and relies on algorithms, hence, by the end of the day, the outcome will not be retrieved by a clinician who searches several months or even years later.

The involvement of public media can be used to translate research for other audiences, not necessarily clinical specialists, e.g., press releases from a university communications office or plain-language articles for readerships such as The Conversation. This approach is especially useful for discoveries on affirming CBT, as school counselors, parents, and community organizations working with LGBTQ youth might never have the opportunity to encounter the work in a scholarly context but can directly benefit from knowing it (Tordoff et al., 2022). The visual summaries and ease of understanding through infographics also reduce the mental effort for non-clinical stakeholders. The weakness of this strategy lies in its accuracy; anything translated into lay language will be simplified, and one must work closely with science communicators to sustain accuracy and make their work more accessible.

Dissemination Plan

The findings from this project will be presented as a poster at a statewide psychiatric nursing conference. This conference was selected because it provides an opportunity to share the evidence with advanced practice clinicians involved in the care of adolescents and young adults with depression and anxiety. To summarize comparative evidence on LGBTQ-affirming CBT relative to standard CBT, the poster will draw on the work of Craig et al. (2021), Pachankis et al. (2023), and Tordoff et al. (2022) to present engagement and symptom outcomes. The poster will be supplemented with a condensed visual abstract to help quickly understand, even in high-

traffic poster sessions. After the conference, all findings will be deposited in an institutional open-access repository and disseminated as a summary in professional digital networks to reach more participants outside the conference. This multi-channel strategy combines conference presentations, repository publication, and professional digital networks to broaden the reach of the findings and support their use in clinical practice.

Objective and Target Audience

The primary aim of this dissemination effort is to support the implementation of LGBTQ- affirming cognitive behavioral therapy in clinical practice. One secondary goal is to encourage further investigation by participating individuals who may be in a position to recreate or expand this evidence in their practice settings, particularly in areas with limited access to identity- affirming psychiatric training (Liu et al., 2023; Xu et al., 2024). The project aims to reach psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioners, school-based mental health providers, and integrated behavioral health coordinators attending the conference, who have a direct impact on referral guidelines, investments in clinician training, and the choice of treatment modality. Another audience is state-level health policy stakeholders who may attend policy-track sessions and then champion funding or training requirements to support affirming care models. Engaging clinical and administrative stakeholders increases the likelihood that evidence will be translated into more permanent practice changes rather than short-term clinical curiosity.

Conclusion

The three dissemination strategies examined—open-access repositories, professional digital and social media platforms, and public media engagement—each offer distinct strengths and limitations. No single method can simultaneously optimize credibility, reach, and dissemination speed. A combined dissemination strategy is the most effective way to disseminate this evidence base. The plan suggested here is based on a state-level presentation and sharing of digital networks after depositing them in a repository, aimed at reaching clinicians and administrators who are in a position to operationalize affirming CBT protocols. Dissemination of this evidence supports the broader goal of decreasing mental health disparities among LGBTQ adolescents and young adults by smoothing the integration of evidence-based interventions into clinical practice.