Evidence-Based Practice Citation That Was of Interest

¶ … Evidence-Based Practice citation that was of interest to the author of this document is called "Closing the quality gap: A critical analysis of quality improvement strategies: volume 5 -- asthma care." It focuses on the phenomenon in which "there remains a significant gap between accepted best practices for asthma care and actual care delivered to asthma patients" (Stanford University, 2007). Specifically, the authors of this document sought to analyze a host of articles related to best practices for treating asthma for juveniles and adults to see which quality improvement strategies had the most efficacy. It analyzed a variety of articles that utilized various frameworks for research including interrupted time series trials and randomized controlled trials. The various strategies considered pertained to patient education, practitioner education, auditing and others.

The primary recommendations have a direct correlation to educating the patients and their families. The evidence demonstrates that for juveniles, consulting and education efforts are best when they are targeted at the parents, family members, and the daily providers for the children -- rather than targeting such information to the juveniles themselves. For adults, there were a host of recommendations that demonstrated efficacy in the treatment of asthma. These included utilizing quality improvement strategies that are "based explicitly on a theoretical framework, provide multiple educational sessions, have longer durations, and use combinations of instructional modalities" (Stanford University, 2007).

Possible research topics include theoretical frameworks for asthma, treatment duration, and quality improvement instructional modalities.

Stanford University (2007). Closing the quality gap: A critical analysis of quality improvement strategies: volume 5 -- asthma care. www.ahrq.gov Retrieved from http://www.ahrq.gov/legacy/clinic/tp/asthmgaptp.htm

In McCloskey's "Nurses' perceptions of research utilization in a corporate health care system," there is not really a control group. The study merely consisted of a group of nurses filling out a survey expressing their opinions and attitudes related to various aspects of research within their organization. What is interesting about the study is that all of the nurses worked in settings that the author defines as part of "a corporate health care system consisting of five hospitals in a large metropolitan area on the east coast" (McCloskey, 2008, p. 39). To truly have a control group in this sort of study, the author would have also surveyed participants from a setting outside of a corporate health care system to see how the results of the two groups compare with one another. However, since the author did not do such a thing, there really is no control group for this study.

There are a few ramifications of the author's decision not to include a control within her research. The most salient of these is the fact that the reader (and potential nurse) is left wondering why, exactly, the author chose to focus the study expressly on nurses in corporate health care systems: especially since "the research practice gap remains a persistent issue for the nursing profession" (Hutchinson and Johnston, 2004, p. 304) in general. The obvious assumption is that she did so simply to have a more narrowly defined population and ensuing study, as well as to leave room for future studies which possibly compared nurses in corporate health care systems to those in non-corporate health care systems. Still, by choosing to use the population sample that she used, the author is implying that there is some sort of significance to nurses in the corporate health care system that is never revealed. The reader can only make assumptions and wonder why.

The quantitative research in this study was gleaned from an instrument referred to as the Research Utilization Questionnaire. This questionnaire consists of four different subscales, each of which utilizes a five point Likert scale. The four subscales consisted of attitude, support, availability, and research use for nurses in relation to the conducting of formal academic research relevant to their profession and practical work. More specifically, the attitude subscale is about how nurses feel regarding participating in such research and includes 21 items; the research use subscale has 10 items and focuses on how much nurses actually utilize research in carrying out their tasks; the availability subscale consists of seven items and focuses on how available research is to nurses; and the support subscale is comprised of eight items and concentrates on how much support nurses get for conducting and studying original research.

The data acquired from the Research Utilization Questionnaire had descriptive statistics applied to them to describe the various demographics which directly correlated to the study's variables. The statistical procedures were performed with SPSS. Most important of all, analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used for the ready comparison of the means of all of the items of the questionnaire; there were 46 items in sum. The ANOVA procedure utilized was simply one-way, and was implemented in order to more accurately gauge the differences in the four variables.

It is worth noting that the vast majority of the results of the Research Utilization Questionnaire ranged from 1 to 3.9. The highest results (which averaged 3.72) were for the attitude subscale, in descending order, the other results were support was second highest at 3.24, research use was next at 3.0 while the availability subscale was last at 2.65.