Evidence-based practice in health care

Evidence Based Practice (EBP) and the health care in US hospitals
The concept of EBP is founded on the evidently sufficient research on how to safely handle health conditions such as heart failure, asthma and diabetes among other conditions. The challenge however is, even in the face of the numerous research conducted which focus on the patients, there is still a wide gap between research and the implementation. This gap is what EBP seeks to address with the ultimate aim of making health care safe and efficient for the patients. By putting into practice what has been research, a significant impact can be made in the life of the patients as has been the history and practice of nursing from the times of nursing practice pioneers such as Florence Nightingale. In a nutshell, EBP is the judicious and contentious utilization of the current best evidence in conjunction with patient values and the clinical expertise to guide the decisions made in the health care process (Walton M.K. et.al, 2010).
One of the most recent and most applicable model in EBP which aims at expediting the transfer of research outcome to the actual safety of patients is the model from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). It is the model that focuses on the concept synthesis, social and organizational innovation, social marketing, and behaviour change. This model postulates that knowledge transfer occurs in series of stages with activities occurring simultaneously in differing sequences, and EBP being multifaceted and with a system and actors (Titler M.G., 2018:3)..
The use of EBP in our organization suffers significantly due to disjointed manner of handling patients where each department seems to work in isolation. There is no seamless flow of events from the time of the arrival of patients with an asthmatic attack or heart attack, to the point they are discharged from the hospital. The point of reception, the consultation department, the admission into inpatient, the dispensation of medication, the laboratory department, the extended care and tests, the records department and several other departments seem to be working in isolation and lack mutuality with each other. The result of this is often detrimental to the quick resuscitation of patients or easing of the pain that the patients suffer upon arrival at the hospital.
The above disjointed approach that lack the system with actors approach as proposed by the AHRQ is occasioned by the policies of the hospital that treats each department as a unit of its own and not part of a whole system. This results in each department feeling that they are responsible for the patient only at the time and point that the patient arrives at their desk, and not providing a holistic approach from the time patient arrives to the exit.
There is hence need to have first, change in policies that our hospital runs on. Being that it is a private establishment, the management needs to have formed an overhaul of the entire system to one that looks and acts as one whole system with the departments being the various actors. There needs to be simplified and clear documentation of the processing of the client and radical reduction of the points of contact for the patient to one or two. There is no need for the patient to be wheeled to the different departments, particularly if they are in critical condition. There also needs to be open communication system between the various departments, such that upon arrival at the hospital, all the departments will be simultaneously notified of the patient and the complication presented hence the concerned department will send in their staff to the point of contact.
In order for this model to succeed, the nurses are an inalienable part of this whole system. It is worth noting that the steps of knowledge transfer in the AHRQ model come in three major stages: (1) knowledge creation and distillation, and in this the nurses will work in close collaboration with the researchers for there to be meaningful and practicable knowledge creation. (2) Diffusion and dissemination, here too, the nurses are the very same people who will aid in the transferring of the findings of the research from the written finding to the hospital setting as they are the ones in contact with the hospitals and patients. (3) Organizational adoption and implementation, this being one of the most significant phase in the AHRQ model, the nurses will help make significant suggestions on creating a hospital procedure and process like the SOPs to help in locally adopting and implementation of the research findings (Titler M.G., (2018:7).
References
Titler M.G., (2018). Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses: The Evidence for Evidence-Based Practice Implementation. Retrieved 07 February 2018 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2659/
Walton M.K. et.al, (2010). Promoting evidence-based practice and translational research. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20562571