Essay On Evidence Based Practice In Nursing

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) agree that if a nurse is following The code: Standards of conduct, performance and ethics for nurses and midwives (NMC 2008) they must recognise how crucial the value of evidence in practice is. They must be able to understand, judge and apply relevant research and theories to their work and so highlighting areas where further research could be undertaken. Evidence based practice is commonly described as the combination of the most up to date research and clinical expertise as well as patient values (Sackett, et al. 2000). This means that it takes into consideration the patients situation, the patients values and goals, the best available research as well as the clinical expertise of the practitioner.
It looks at peoples experiences, attitudes, beliefs and perceptions of a situation (forchuk & Roberts 1993). To show this style of research I looked at a qualitative report about understanding the lives of the families affected by stroke. The aim of this study was to look at the lives of stroke survivor’s careers with reference to caring and coping as well as looking at the factors that had an impact on their lives. This piece of literature was issued to me by my course leader Clive Warn during lesson two of Appreciating Evidence for practice. Qualitative data collection can involve using artifacts, documents interviews or a mixture of all (Summerskill,W. 2001). This study is very specifically a quantitative study as it took all of its information from the stroke victims and career. To take this information a qualitatitive descriptive design was used (sandelowski 2000), data was collected through interviews of them both together and some of just the carerer. This can be a bonus and a drawback, if the patient wasn’t there the carerer could have interpreted them wrongly or been able to say necessary things that they wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying when the patient was present. I think that this situation could have been improved by way of interviews being taken of the care receiver and giver together and separately. The sample size for this study was 30 even though typical of a qualitative study is still rather small, especially considering that only 7 of the carers were male. Everyone is the sample group were also all Caucasian and either British or Irish. As this study was not open for generalisation it is acceptable that, geographically, it was such a small study. This piece of research was commissioned by North Ireland