This month I’m talking about the questions to ask when critically appraising a research study for use in your evidence-based nursing practice. In this post, I’ll address the question of determining if the actual research findings/results are significant and meaningful – What are the Results? (AKA Are the Results Important?) The major
Critical appraisal skills are essential for the nurse, regardless of role or clinical expertise. I introduced you to the topic of critical appraisal in evidence-based practice (EBP) in the last blog post. I provided the purpose of critical appraisal and overviewed the steps of critical appraisal. In this post, I’ll
All undergraduate nursing students take a nursing theory/nursing philosophy course. Masters and doctoral students take advanced courses in theory. What’s the point? To use theory for nursing practice, of course! Many students wonder about the purpose of nursing theory — and just theory in general. Is it just an academic
Nursing theory is not that old. Other than Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing in 1860, nursing theories only started to be developed in the 1950s. So was nursing atheoretical until then? No. Nurses “borrowed” theories from other disciplines to inform nursing practice. Nurses borrowed theories from psychology, physiology, sociology, medicine, physics, and organizational
Assumptions, beliefs, and values are terminology used when describing the foundation of nursing theories. Theories are used to describe, explain, and predict nursing phenomena, that is, the nursing metaparadigm concepts. Nursing theory is the theorist’s worldview or personal perspective of how the nursing world works. Understanding the theorist’s assumptions, beliefs, and
This is part two of two posts to foster your ability to systematically frame your questions to craft a search strategy that will offer you the best chance at finding the relevant and valid evidence you need to answer those questions, in the most time-efficient manner possible. The first post
This post is the first of two parts for crafting an efficient search strategy for research studies and for evidence-based practice (EBP) projects. In this post, I’ll provide 4 steps to get you halfway to writing a search strategy. I’ll show you how to identify a clinical question and your knowledge
You learn about statistical conclusion errors in every basic nursing research class and are expected to understand what these errors mean. Wait! Did I learn about this, you ask? Yes, yes, you did. Remember Type I and Type II errors? Those are statistical conclusion errors. But I’ll tell you that
When reviewing a clinical practice guideline (CPG) or systematic review (SR) with practice recommendations, you’ll notice two scales that are used in conjunction with each practice recommendation offered: a levels of evidence scale and a grading scale. I talked about levels of evidence (LOE) hierarchies in last week’s post. This
When looking for evidence – where should you start? Well at the top of course! At the top of the hierarchy of evidence quality is pre-appraised evidence (Haynes, 2007). If you go through your university or medical library, there are multiple databases to search, such as MEDLINE or CINAHL. You