Research: Evidence-based Nursing Practice: How to Get There from Here

patients in preparation for surgery; as a public health nurse, I taught mothers to clean their infants’ umbilical cords with alcohol and showed patients newly diagnosed with diabetes how to wipe the skin with alcohol before injecting insulin. Since then, high-quality research has shown that pre-operative shaving increases rather than decreases post-operative infections (Kjonniksen et al. 2002), that cleaning umbilical cords with sterile water shortens the time to cord separation without increasing infections (Medves and O’Brien 1997) and that insulin can be safely injected through clothing (Fleming et al. 1997). These are only three of innumerable examples of how high-quality studies of nursing care can influence our practice. And while it is heartening to know that new evidence is constantly emerging to inform our nursing practice, it is disheartening to learn that many nurses continue to rely on the increasingly dated knowledge they acquired as nursing students (Estabrooks 1998). In this paper, I will describe how high-quality evidence fits into clinical decision-making in nursing practice, and I will call upon key professional groups, such as associations of nursing educators, executive nurses and national nursing organizations, to combine forces and create blue ribbon panels or task forces charged with making recommendations for changes in nursing education and practice that will advance us towards full development as an evidence-based profession.