13 Evidence-Based Practice Skills to Improve Healthcare Quality

When health professionals need to make daily clinical decisions, research shows that evidence-based practice (EBP) often produces the best results. EBP combines external evidence with a patient’s preferences and a clinician’s own expertise, resulting in the best decisions and patient outcomes.

New research in Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing describes a set of new EPB competencies for practicing registered nurses and advanced practice nurses that, if implemented by healthcare systems across the nation, could result in higher quality, reliability, and consistency of healthcare, while also reducing costs.

A team of thought-leaders and experts in the field of EBP research surveyed nurses from across the United States and based on the results, the team developed a set of 13 competencies for practicing registered nurses and 11 additional competencies for advanced practice nurses.

The competencies include:
•Questions clinical practices for the purpose of improving the quality of care.
•Describes clinical problems using internal evidence.
•Searches for external evidence to answer focused clinical questions.
•Participates in the critical appraisal of published research studies to determine their strength and applicability to clinical practice.
•Evaluates outcomes of evidence-based decisions and practice changes for individuals, groups, and populations to determine best practices.

The full list can be read here

“Although it is widely known that evidence-based practice improves healthcare quality, reliability, and patient outcomes while also reducing variations in care and costs, it is still not the standard of care delivered by practicing clinicians across the globe,” said lead author Dr Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk, Associate Vice President for Health Promotion and Dean of the College of Nursing from The Ohio State University. “Adoption of specific EBP competencies for nurses and advanced practice nurses (APNs) who practice in real-world healthcare settings can assist institutions in achieving high-value, low-cost evidence-based health care.”