ESSAY: Creating a Culture of Evidence-Based Practice

An abundance of evidence can be found on almost any medical issue or health topic. Often, the availability of information is not the concern, but rather nurses struggle with how to convey the evidence to others and change practices to better reflect the evidence. Deep-rooted organizational cultures and policies can make some resistant to change, even to changes that can vastly improve the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of health care. However, there are many strategies that nurses can employ to bring about changes to practice.

In this Discussion, you focus on how to create an organizational culture that supports evidence-based practice.

To prepare:

• Review the information in this week’s Learning Resources. Examine the various suggestions for promoting an organizational culture that embraces the use of EBP.
• Reflect on your own organization’s (or one in which you have worked) support of evidence-based practice. Examine how culture and policies impact the adoption of changes to practice based on evidence. What barriers exist?
• Consider the models and suggestions for promoting evidence-based practice featured in this week’s Learning Resources. Identify models and suggestions that would work well in your organization.
• Reflect on the significance of evidence-based practice in health care. What responsibility do nurses have to promote EBP and change practices to better reflect evidence and research findings?
• Reflect on how nurses can disseminate findings from evidence-based practice research.

By Day 3

Post an evaluation of your organization’s use of EBP and how it is furthered or hindered by organizational culture and policies. Describe how you could disseminate the findings. Propose a strategy for strengthening the culture of EBP within the organization. Discuss a nurse’s responsibility to further the use of EBP, providing a rationale supported by specific information from the Learning Resources.

ANSWER

Currently, I work at a children’s healthcare center, which is more of a community hospital. Evidence based practice (EBP) is important because it enables nurses to access and use scientifically permitted evidence so that they can deliver healthcare that is of good quality to the people (Underhill, Roper, Siefert, Boucher, & Berry, 2015). Over the last few years, nurses at my place of work managed to introduce and implement an important evidence-based policy relating to pediatric sedation during painful procedures. The nursing team presented evidence-based data and research findings in favor of pediatric sedation, which used nitrous oxide for painful surgical procedures in children. All the involved nurses shared the idea with doctors and the top administration and within no time, the procedure was adopted in the emergency unit. The hospital management has been very supportive of this idea.

XXXXXXXXXX organization policies played a role in ensuring efficient adoption of pediatric sedation practice. First of all, the existing hospital regulations require the management team to evaluate and support new XXXXXXXXXX by the various departments XXXXXXXXXX, the existing policies require the organization to set aside funds to cater for research aimed at improving the productivity and efficiency of the hospital. However, resistance to change has been a major hindrance to the full realization of the benefits XXXXXXXXXX with pediatric sedation. The internal structures of the organization also make it difficult to support certain changes in the XXXXXXXXXX.

Disseminating Findings

The audience XXXXXXXXXX how the research findings are disseminated (Visovsky et al., 2017). In XXXXXXXXXX this case, the audience XXXXXXXXXX the healthcare professionals and the surrounding community. XXXXXXXXXX the sake of the healthcare team, conference presentations and science journals would be suitable. XXXXXXXXXX the other hand, social media platforms, YouTube videos and blogs would serve the community…