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...
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…
