While many people are under the impression that nursing is one unified field in terms of approach, the truth is that there’s a wide variety of approaches that nurses and their teams can take. One particular approach that is steadily gaining in popularity is evidence-based nursing.
At the same time, many in the healthcare space are working tirelessly to address one of healthcare’s biggest problems. Namely, making healthcare more accessible to the countless people in need of healthcare services.
Understanding how evidence-based healthcare can help achieve this aim is key to developing a more nuanced perspective on the current evolution of healthcare.
Here is the significance of evidence-based nursing in making healthcare more accessible.
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Understanding Evidence-Based Nursing
Before developing a keen understanding of how evidence-based nursing can make healthcare more accessible to a wide array of people, it’s first important to understand evidence-based nursing itself.
Put simply, this form of nursing uses the best and most up-to-date clinical findings to inform the decision-making process. As a result, nurses who subscribe to this approach apply the insights they glean from research when treating and caring for patients.
The Five Steps of Evidence-Based Nursing
The evidence-based nursing approach contains five key steps that nurses must engage in.
These steps are:
- Ask: At this phase, nurses craft a clinical question that has an actionable answer.
- Acquire: Next, nurses seek out relevant clinical information that can help provide an answer to their questions.
- Appraise: Before utilizing clinical research to answer their questions, nurses using this approach must appraise the research and decide if it’s accurate and applicable enough to be used.
- Apply: At this stage, nurses and nurse leaders will utilize their findings to make a change that they see fit.
- Assess: After all the previous steps have been completed, nurses must monitor the changes they made and see if they’ve been effective or useful.
How Applying Evidence-Based Insights Makes Healthcare More Accessible
Accessibility has been one of the most significant problems in the American healthcare system over the last decade. As a result, many in the industry are looking for ways to overcome this challenge and spread access to the countless Americans in need of robust healthcare resources.
Fortunately, evidence-based nursing may be a practice that can make a substantial impact on accessibility in a variety of meaningful ways.
In particular, nurses using this approach can improve healthcare accessibility by innovating the way that care is provided. For example, one of the biggest barriers individuals experience when receiving healthcare services is a lack of money.
Nurses, however, can change this. Essentially, evidence-based nursing allows nurses and nurse leaders to try new treatments and innovate in their space. This type of testing can result in cheaper ways of treating patients. As such, nurses can help healthcare organizations cut back on costs and pass these savings on to patients.
Another benefit of evidence-based nursing that can make healthcare more accessible is nurses taking their findings to various spaces. As has been noted, evidence-based nursing can allow healthcare professionals to find more effective ways of treating patients. For nurses who provide care in a variety of spaces, this can be extremely impactful.
For example, nurses often provide care to not just those in hospitals, but also those in their community. This can be done through smaller clinics and other means of providing healthcare to those in need.
By bringing their evidence-based approaches to these spaces, these nurses can ensure that patients in these contexts are also receiving effective care that can have an impact on their health and, as a result, their lives.
Barriers to Evidence-Based Nursing Becoming Normalized Across Facilities
While evidence-based nursing has no doubt proven itself to be an amazing framework for nurses and nurse leaders to utilize, there are still barriers that nurses must overcome to engage in this type of nursing.
One of the biggest challenges nurses face is a lack of time and familiarity with the way that clinical research papers are written. In terms of time, nurses often work significant hours that make it difficult to find meaningful work/life balance without trying to regularly scour through clinical research papers.
Analyzing and ingesting clinical research papers can also be extremely difficult. Oftentimes, clinical research papers contain a significant amount of jargon and are written in ways that are difficult to comprehend for those unfamiliar with them.
As such, nurses who don’t have an educational background in research processes often find it difficult to engage with clinical research papers, despite their advanced critical thinking skills.
Why Education Plays a Vital Role in Increasing the Popularity of Evidence-Based Nursing
As has been noted, it’s incredibly difficult for nurses without a clinical research background to engage in evidence-based nursing. This highlights the fact that nursing education plays a key role in preparing nurses with the skills to engage in this meaningful nursing approach.
While aspiring healthcare professionals may acquire the skills they require when pursuing advanced degrees, such as doctor of nursing practice degrees, or degrees in fields such as epidemiology, this isn’t always the case in typical nursing programs.
To ensure that evidence-based practice grows in the coming years, nursing programs must incorporate clinical research into their teaching materials. By being exposed to clinical research in this way, nurses across the board will have the necessary skills to start engaging in evidence-based approaches.
Evidence-Based Nursing is the Future of Healthcare
Beyond making healthcare treatments and processes more effective, evidence-based nursing can also make healthcare resources more accessible to countless American patients in need.
This being the case, many are hopeful that this nursing approach will be championed in the healthcare space in the coming years and, as a result, more individuals will receive the care they need.
About The Author:
Stacey Smith is a freelance health writer. She is passionate about writing about women’s health, dental health, diabetes, endocrinology, and nutrition and provides in-depth features on the latest in health news for medical clinics and health magazines.
