When health professionals need to make daily clinical decisions,
research shows that evidence-based practice (EBP) often produces the
best results. EBP combines external evidence with a patient’s
preferences and a clinician’s own expertise, resulting in the best
decisions and patient outcomes.
New research in Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing describes
a set of new EPB competencies for practicing registered nurses and
advanced practice nurses that, if implemented by healthcare systems
across the nation, could result in higher quality, reliability, and
consistency of healthcare, while also reducing costs.
A team of thought-leaders and experts in the field of EBP research
surveyed nurses from across the United States and based on the results,
the team developed a set of 13 competencies for practicing registered
nurses and 11 additional competencies for advanced practice nurses.
The competencies include:
•Questions clinical practices for the purpose of improving the quality
of care.
•Describes clinical problems using internal evidence.
•Searches for external evidence to answer focused clinical questions.
•Participates in the critical appraisal of published research studies to
determine their strength and applicability to clinical practice.
•Evaluates outcomes of evidence-based decisions and practice changes for
individuals, groups, and populations to determine best practices.
The full list can be read here
“Although it is widely known that evidence-based practice improves
healthcare quality, reliability, and patient outcomes while also
reducing variations in care and costs, it is still not the standard of
care delivered by practicing clinicians across the globe,” said lead
author Dr Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk, Associate Vice President for Health
Promotion and Dean of the College of Nursing from The Ohio State
University. “Adoption of specific EBP competencies for nurses and
advanced practice nurses (APNs) who practice in real-world healthcare
settings can assist institutions in achieving high-value, low-cost
evidence-based health care.”
