Summary & Introduction
There are a lot of patients that are in need of immediate and continuous healthcare services these days. It is the duty of nursing and other medical professionals to provide accessible healthcare services to those who need it. This is basically why there is also a need to improve the management process because it comes hand in hand or happens simultaneously with the patient treatment process. A hospital with a relatively expert and medically proficient workforce and a highly efficient management will not only be able to serve more patients; they will also be able to serve those patients more appropriately.
Implementing Evidence-Based Practice Initiatives
The pool of medical workers who graduated more than a decade ago actually increases every year and whether we like it or not, we could say at some point that they may have missed a lot of medical updates and new practices during their stay at the clinics or academe. A medical professional has to stay updated with the latest trends and practices in the medical field because he may be able to use those in treating and administering proper plans of care to his patients. Evidence-based practice has the potential to improve overall patient outcomes because it basically uses valid, researched and most importantly, tested evidences that could serve as options that medical professionals may choose (Abiebr, 2011). Medicine basically has a long history if we are going to track it down and we cannot remove the fact that there were (in fact, there still are) treatment plans for different cases that are less effective or worse, ineffective compared to other treatment options. So basically, it helps the medical professional choose the best treatment for his patient in a valid and evidence-based way.
Most medical professionals these days are actually advised to resort to using evidence-based practice whenever they feel they are facing a rather complex case. Simple cases could also be reinforced with evidences so that a more positive patient outcome could be obtained. The effectiveness of using evidence-based practice in the field of medicine and rehabilitation has already been proven and it actually works. Nurses could review and look for evidences from the thousands of journal articles and studies being published from different universities every year and use them as sources of evidences. However, there are a lot of skills that a nurse should learn before being able to search and use those evidences fast and effectively (Fink, Thompson, & Bonnes, 2005). What the hospital management could do is to provide training sessions and seminars for their staff relating to the use of evidence-based practice and its effectiveness in treatment and rehabilitation.
The hospital management should actually encourage the medical professionals in all departments to use evidences in treating their patients. That way, errors made from treatment directed techniques would be limited because basically, the treatments that the nurses will implement were already tested; so, they won’t have to test it anymore. Some of the topics that seminars and training sessions for EBPT should include key points such as how and where to look for the evidences because how could nurses use evidences if they do not have access to those in the first place? Nurses from the hospital should also be able to learn how to differentiate different research study designs critically appraise an article (Beyea & Slattery, 2006). By knowing these things, the outcomes of using EBPT for treatment and rehabilitation and patient and client satisfaction should be positive.
References
Abiebr. (2011). Importance of Evidence-Based Practice. Accessed Febuary 2012. Available at http://www.abiebr.com/set/1-introduction-and-methodology/17-importance-evidence-based-practice.
Beyea, C., & Slattery, M. (2006). Evidence-based Practice in Nursing. HCPro Inc. Book.
Fink, R., Thompson, C., &Bonnes, D. (2005). Overcoming barriers and promoting use of research in practice. Journal of Nursing Administration. Print.
