Confirmation Bias Healthcare Research Evidence Based Practic

The senior nurses’ request to only appraise the articles that discuss the use of alcohol-impregnated caps is misguided and should be resisted. First of all, it needs to be pointed out that a conflict of interest might be found in the AACN conference luncheon where the study sponsored by the company selling the alcohol impregnated caps was presented. Researchers need to consider who or what organization funds research and why that matters (Ioannidis, 2018). And as Bakhit et al. (2021) show, researchers need to be aware that funded research can be promoted for the purpose of facilitating sales of a product to the exclusion of other evidence-based practices that are just as effective.

From a philosophical and ethical perspective, however, the evidence-based practitioner has a responsibility to appraise articles that go beyond a single intervention—and the reason for that responsibility is that their focus should be on achieving quality care. To focus only on one intervention is to say that essentially this is the only intervention that matters. It is akin to someone arguing that there is only one way to treat Covid and that is through the Pfizer vaccine—after all, Pfizer funded several studies that prove the vaccine works. Other health care workers, doctors, and researchers could point to numerous other interventions that are just as effective depending on the population—and they are right to do so, because when health care providers put themselves solely into the hands of a single organization that stands to profit from the promotion of their recommended intervention the health care worker is not longer focusing on putting quality care of persons first—the health care worker is focusing on profits first, for the health care worker is now acting as an agent of or on behalf of the company that stands to profit.

Health care workers and researchers are not agents of the health care industry; they are providers of quality care, and they must use evidence-based practice in their care. This means they must know what the best practices are based on the evidence. And that means they have to look at more than a single intervention. One single intervention promoted by an organization selling the intervention may not in and of itself be bad. That is not the point. It may be a great intervention, and it may even be the best intervention; but the researcher has to know this—which means the researcher has to look at other interventions, other studies, compare and contrast them, and engage in real critical thinking.

Nurses who come back from a single luncheon adamant that the intervention they heard about be the only intervention researchers focus on are missing this point. Their enthusiasm is understandable, of course. Indeed, to know more about the intervention, one should research it and figure out what other trials have shown. This is all a part of conducting research: looking at multiple trials, multiple studies, looking at the populations used in the studies, looking at who funded the studies, and so on. Researchers cannot, however, be biased in their research—and they should avoid confirmation bias, unconscious bias, and any other bias that might affect how they do their research (Page et al., 2019).