Coverage of evidence-based practice

[AOx1]

Students, what has been your experience with evidence-based practice in the classroom and clinical settings?

Have your courses covered the rationale behind nursing interventions? Have you received assistance in identifying research-based sources of best practices? Do you see current, evidence-based practices modeled in the classroom and clinical setting?

I am a nursing instructor, and this is an issue close to my heart. I want my students to graduate with an understanding of why we select one intervention over another. I want them to know that nursing is a profession with constant change, and to model curiosity and willingness to continue my education. Just because you graduate shouldn't mean you stop learning.

What has worked well to help you learn the use of evidence-based practice?

[Nurse SMS, MSN, RN]

My school does a lot with evidenc-based research and teaches from that perspective. We have projects every semester that require us to engage in searching out current nursing research and use it as a basis for our work and the head librarian at our school has made assisting nursing students in doing this kind of research her personal mission, which is awesome. Rationales are gone over in instruction - but one area the school lacks is in giving correct answers with rationales behind exam questions. We don't get to review the correct answers or discuss the rationales, which seems short sighted and to be cutting off an obvious pathway to learning. We get our exam grades but never even get to see what we need further work on or where our thinking went wrong.

Our instructors are empowered to change certain things at clinicals or in student mentoring based on reputable nursing research studies. This semester we have stopped doing care plans and have started doing a "reflective journal" instead due to evidence apparently showing it is more effective for the adult learner than care planning is. I certainly find it more useful.

[Clovery]

>Students, what has been your experience with evidence-based practice in the classroom and clinical settings?

We have to write a short research paper using at least two current nursing journal articles at least once or twice a semester. When we do our care plans, we have to list citations for our interventions, which cannot be our textbook. However, the recommended care plan book (Ackley) lists the citations for you and our instructors have no problem with us using them. It's not like we have to go to journals to find rationales for our interventions. I wouldn't mind so much because I enjoy reading journals but I can't imagine that it's practical for a working nurse to do that when she's formulating care plans for her patients in the hospital.

>Have your courses covered the rationale behind nursing interventions?

Eh, sometimes. For example, we learned that it's no longer recommended to aspirate when giving injections, but not WHY. Just don't do it. It really depends on the instructor and the topic. Our lab instructors tend to be older, retired nurses who aren't usually very current with anything.

>Have you received assistance in identifying research-based sources of best practices?

We had a tutorial in the library before our first research paper on how to find resources. I already was familiar with using databases, but I don't think the tutorial was very helpful for those students who had no previous experience.

>Do you see current, evidence-based practices modeled in the classroom and clinical setting?

I think so? It's hard to say because often all we know is what they tell us, so I have no idea if I'm being taught the most current, research-tested method. It's rare that an instructor will mention something like "and this is a new way of doing it based on this study."

>What has worked well to help you learn the use of evidence-based practice?

I enjoy doing research and writing papers. I wish we did more of that and it had some effect on our grade. If we did have to go to the journals when writing careplans, that would probably help too. At my school (community college) we don't get grades for anything we write, so it's hard to justify doing more than the bare minimum, since we only get an S or a U for all assignments and our test scores are the only thing that affects our grade. Hopefully I will get to practice more research and writing when I go for my BSN.