Experience With Evidence Based Practice

Experience With Evidence Based Practice

Please create your Self-Introduction focusing on your experience with evidence-based practice using a creative video. In this video please identify your: Educational and Clinical experience What is your experience with Evidence Based Practice or Research Areas of Advanced Practice you are interested in researching for your MSN Capstone Project Personal goals for learning about Evidence Based Practice or Research One or two personal items about yourself. Post your introduction to the Week One “Introductions” discussion forum. Experience With Evidence Based Practice

As evidence-based practice gains ground across industries and sectors, and matures in practice and understanding, inevitably, cul-de-sacs, false starts and myths develop that help us to build a better understanding about evidence-based practice and how to implement it – you know, the practice bit. As ideas, thinking and practices emerge they become stress tested as people engage with them in the face of organisational operational reality. In effect, as practice develops and discussions widen and narrow, original practices and thinking are challenged in their own version of peer-review testing.

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Evidence-based practice is essentially a practice. It involves people taking action in their own contexts and realities, developing experience, questioning, nudging and problem solving. Research evidence, ideas, perspectives and practices are stress tested ‘in situ’ in a live, ever shifting laboratory of life. This is not about slavishly following academic research, as some (primarily academics) would have you believe.

The role of context 

The problem with research is that either it was conducted in a context or, in the case of meta-analysis and systematic reviews, out of context. There a number of different contexts that can change research findings or results and these include:

Era based contexts. Fashions of thinking, cognition and analysis occur. We don’t think like people did in the 50s or 1800s. Thinking changes and, as a result, so does research and its findings.
Cultural contexts can change research findings significantly.  This applies to regional, national and micro (organisational) cultural levels.
Technological contexts frequently alter. Experience With Evidence Based Practice

These contextual issues may or may not be factors in the research findings. The issue is that no research study can account for every contextual variable.  Now this is not an argument that research is invalid due to contextual issues. It isn’t. Randomised controlled trials, meta-analysis and systematic reviews are all pretty much generalisable. However, the decision about whether a particular study or series of studies is applicable or how much it is applicable usually rests with someone with experience.

The problem with experience

There is a problem though. Usually, in organisations the people making decisions have little knowledge of the research evidence, have scant understanding of the limitations of research, and almost no expertise in evidence-based decision making. So whilst experience is normally a key component of the evidence based decision making process, few people in organisations have the right kind of experience. They may have experience of their job or of the organisation, but, unlike most clinical consultants in the health services, they tend to have hardly any experience with using research in an evidence based way.

Medical clinicians are brought up and trained to study the latest research on a continual basis. It’s part of their professional creed and culture. They can cite the most recent medical research and what the latest thinking is in the profession, not just what is happening in the organisation or industry. They know the research. They understand the research. They know its strengths and limitations. When they combine this with their professional experience, it becomes a powerful tool.

Few people in organisations have this level of expertise and experience with not just their job, but with using academic research and with practising evidence-based operations and decision-making. Whilst many in organisations would disagree with this and categorically state that they make evidence-based decisions, there is a distinction to be made here about evidence-based decision making and making decisions using evidence and it is a lot more than semantics and playing with words. There is a very real difference. Experience With Evidence Based Practice