This week, I'm going to talk about the

background of
research, sections of a research article,
abstracts, and the introduction section.
The objectives of this week are to
identify the four sections of a research
article, to determine the purpose of the
abstract, to identify two
key components of the introduction section
of an article, to identify three elements
of a research question, and to understand
why operational definitions are important.
First, I want to start with an idea about
what is research?
Research problem is a discrepancy between
the way
things are and the way they ought to be.
And I always find this quote by Donna
Diers just so simple and so clear.
It really is summarizing why we're doing
research.
We're thinking about things the way they
are
and think about what the future could be.
What else do we need to know?
How else could things be?
So the first question we always wonder
about is, why are we studying research?
Why do clinicians, administrators, health
policy advocates, need to study research?
How do clinicians use research in their
practice?
Why do clinicians need to know about
research?
So in this course we will be answering
these questions and many more.
It's important to think about the
background
about research and think about
evidence-based practice.
What that does is it helps us build
knowledge to improve care.
We have a pyramid here to show us
what we're talking about, about building
knowledge for practice.
Evidence based practice is really the
integration of the
best research evidence with clinical
expertise and patient values.
We need all different components to build
upon research.
So as you can see on the bottom of the
pyramid, we have three different studies.
And the way we build evidence is, is that
we look at each
individual research article, which would
be considered
primary research articles, that
investigate a new idea.
And together, we can put these articles

together in a systematic review.

And the systematic review, can then
collectively look across the articles and
summarize the key important pieces, of the
research, to guide our clinical practice.
So once there is a good systematic
review, we can develop clinical practice
guidelines.
And from there, those guidelines can then
become the future of a clinical protocol.
So as you can see from this pyramid, we
would never just go and
develop a clinical protocol, we would need
to have some evidence in the literature.
And it isn't just one study alone, we need
several studies together That can help us
build knowledge.
So, this is really the building blocks of
what is evidence based practice.
There are three parts here.
The research findings, the patient values,
and the clinical expertise.
And one of the people who really did the
beginning works on
evidence-based practice, was, Dr. Sackett,
and the reference is on the bottom here.
What we find is, is that research alone,
is not the reas-, reason for changing
practice.
We need to have, very good solid research,
through the research
findings, but we also need to consider
what are the patient values?
What's important for patient care?
What do the patients want, and what are
their needs?
And then we build on that, and think
about our own clinical expertise and each
clinician has
many many years of experience, and a
really good
sense of what they believe is the best
expertise,
so together we would put research,
clinicians experience, and
patience values, and together we can build
evidence base practice.
I want to talk a little bit about an
article here that was
very interesing in learning, in helping us
learns about nurses in evidence based
practice.
The purpose of the article was to examine
nurses perceptions
of their access to tools with which to
obtain evidence and
whether they have the skills to do so.
The sample was a stratified random sample
of 3000 nurses in the United States.
It was a 37% response rate, with 1097

responses.
And 760 of them were clinicians.
What the results were, they felt the
nurses
said,"We feel more confident asking
colleagues or peers and
searching the internet or web, than using
bibliographic databases
such as PubMed or CINAHL to find specific
information."
So, what they're saying here is, is that
the nurses were saying that they
really enjoy talking to their colleagues,
rather than going to some of the more
scientific literature web based articles
that you would find on things like PubMed.
67% of the people that responded
sought information on research from their
colleagues.
And many of them said they don't
understand or value research.
They also said, they have very little
training to use the
tools to help them find evidence, from
which to base practice.
Of these that, the people who responded to
the survey, 49%,
I do want to say, had a bachelor's degree
or higher.
About 21% were less than 40 years of age
and 86% of the people who responded
said that they were white .60% of them
worked in a hospital.
So
when we looked at this 749 respondents we
found that when you ask
this question how often do you need
information to support your nursing role.
It was interesting to see, that only 28%
said that they
really needed information like research,
several times a week or often.
33% said that they need it on a regular
basis, which meant weekly.
27% said
occasionally, which is one to two times a
week, and 12% said seldom.
That less than once a month would they
actually need some research information to
support their role.
I hope that through this course, nurses
and other
health professionals will be able to apply
the new knowledge
that they learn in this course and be able
to apply research to their practice on a
daily basis.
This is a question for you to fill out.
What are the components of evidence-based
practice?

A, is research findings.
B, is patient values.
C, is clinical expertise, and
D,is all of the above.
The answer is D, all of the above.