Everything You Need to Know About Evidence-Based Nursing
Having a working knowledge of evidence-based nursing is essential for nurses. It helps you to identify your knowledge gaps and apply the findings of the literature to your own patients’ problems. It also helps you to reduce the risk of spreading healthcare-associated infections.
Reducing the Chance of Spreading Healthcare-Associated Infections
Using evidence-based nursing practices to reduce the chance of spreading healthcare-associated infections is a cost-effective way to protect patients and healthcare workers. According to an evidence based practice nursing definition, a systematic strategy to minimize infections is required to guarantee the best patient safety.
Nurses can decrease the risk of transmitting infections by following prevention and control practices such as proper hand hygiene, personal protective barriers, and aseptic work practices. These strategies can also help to protect a healthcare facility from the spread of multi-resistant microorganisms.
Antimicrobial resistance has increased dramatically in recent years. This is a major public health problem, and the impact of such an epidemic can be devastating. Increasing the effectiveness of IPC programs is essential to preventing these highly transmissible diseases.
Identifying Your Personal Knowledge Gaps
Identifying your knowledge gaps when practicing evidence-based nursing is not a trivial task. Although it may seem daunting, the effort will reward you with a sense of accomplishment and a healthy ego boost. Similarly, it will pay dividends in enhanced productivity and better patient outcomes. It may even be the secret to success in the medical profession.
This may be a function of one’s knowledge, but the following may provide helpful hints. It’s not uncommon for nurses to spend a good portion of their waking hours performing clinical tasks, or as the acronym might suggest, on the clock. For these reasons, a solid education program can greatly enhance workplace productivity and performance.
Applying Literature Findings to Your Patients’ Problems
Using evidence-based practices in nursing can improve patient outcomes, decrease healthcare costs, and reduce the chance of contracting infections. This means fewer hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), fewer treatment complications, and quicker recovery.
To effectively use evidence-based practices, nurses must identify gaps in their knowledge and apply research findings to their problems. Then, they must analyze the data to determine whether it is reliable and useful for their clinical practice.
As a nurse, staying up-to-date on the latest medical developments and protocols is important. One way to do this is by conducting literature searches. This will allow you to understand the body of evidence comprehensively.
Once you have your research, you can translate it into a practice plan for changing your clinical practices. This will reduce the time spent searching for information and enable you to make more efficient decisions.
Putting Patients’ Needs First
Even though it is supported by research, evidence-based nursing also takes the preferences of particular patients into account. Evidence-based practice enables you to keep enhancing patient outcomes while considering each patient’s preferences and experiences because concentrating on the patient’s requirements is one of nursing’s fundamental principles.
Informed Consent
Whether or not informed consent is the best choice for your patient is a matter of personal opinion. However, obtaining a patient’s permission to perform a medical procedure is important in health care treatment planning.
The goal of informed consent is to maintain a patient’s autonomy. Although the concept of consent is not new, obtaining it is becoming more sophisticated.
Informed consent is not only about the legal document but about the communication of information. To this end, many hospitals have templates for specific procedures. These include boxes to stimulate questions from patients.
A good consent form should contain a checklist of the major elements of the process. It should also include an Informed Consent and Authorization Certification document. These documents remind you of the topics to be discussed and serve as proof of compliance with your institution’s ethical guidelines.
