NRS 490 Week 9 Essay Discussion
Barriers to EBP and their Solutions
Barriers to EBP Change
Time and knowledge: When asked what they need more of, busy clinicians will often say time is their priority. Lack of time is often cited as a barrier to implementing EBP. In addition, uncertainty or lack of knowledge about the EBP process is also a barrier, which includes critiquing and appraising the literature related to the clinical problem being addressed.NRS 490 Week 9 Essay Discussion
Resistance: We’ve all probably heard the phrase “because we’ve always done it this way” when asking why we do what we do every day. Changing this culture can be a challenge, but as EBP becomes the norm in health care, it should be easier to overcome. One person alone is insufficient to change a practice, which is why having a culture that supports a spirit of inquiry and an evidence-based approach to care is so important.
Strategies to Overcome
Stakeholders: One of the first and most important things you can do is to engage the appropriate stakeholders. Doing this builds trust and enables you to learn from their experience and provide input on the project. Stakeholders can also play a role in identifying outcome measures. Having buy-in from the start will help you to plan a better project and implementation strategy.
Administration support: Similarly, having support from your administration from the beginning is a key factor in success. Administration may be able to inform you about other projects that used similar implementation techniques and how they worked. Also, administration plays a key role in developing an organizational culture that supports EBP.
Changing the way we practice is really changing a behavior, but behavior change isn’t easy. It takes persistence, perseverance, and a willingness to be open to new options along the way. You will hit barriers, but you will also learn strategies that will help you to overcome them. Working together, we can ensure an EBP environment that will lead to better outcomes for our patients and ourselves.NRS 490 Week 9 Essay DiscussionLong-term adoption of evidence based practice is required to improve and promote sustainable effective quality of health care to enhance patient outcomes (Koehn & Lehman, 2008). In spite of the proven benefits of applying evidence based practice in health system, various barriers hinder its successful implementation of evidence based practice. Some of the barriers include challenges in incorporating medical practice guidelines to enhance quality of care, difficulties in translating research into practice setting and dynamic changes in institutional culture (Pierson & Schuelke, 2009).
In the implementation process of my evidence based practice, the potential barriers that would hinder it from achieving the desired outcomes are lack of motivation among the nursing staff and institutional barriers. Lack of motivation among the nursing and other medical professionals is one of the major barriers. Some of the factors that could contribute to low motivation include lack of adequate nursing staff, thereby increasing the workload for the existing care teams (Pierson & Schuelke, 2009).
Lack of incentives to implement evidence based practice is another factor that would cause low motivation among the nurses to implement and realize the desired changes. To enhance the motivation of the nurses, providing appropriate incentives and addressing the underlying issues is of critical importance (Koehn & Lehman, 2008). In this case, I would encourage multidisciplinary collaboration among the medical professionals in the healthcare institution to reduce work load and also to facilitate knowledge transfer, especially to the newly employed nurses. NRS 490 Week 9 Essay DiscussionThe second barrier that could undermine attainment of the anticipated change in the healthcare organization is inappropriate institutional culture, which does not support the practice. Inappropriate institutional culture includes failure to demand the best practice from the nurses, failure to provide necessary resources and failure to provide professional and educational advancement opportunities for nurses so that that they can enhance their skills on evidence based practice (Koehn & Lehman, 2008). To solve this barrier, involving the organization’s management as a key stakeholder during implementation of evidence based practice is of critical importance. In addition, involving trained mentors who are familiar with the institutional culture would help in bringing the desired change to facilitate uptake of evidence based practice.NRS 490 Week 9 Essay Discussion