Evidence-Based Approach in Nursing Decision-Making

Evidence-Based Practice: Case 1
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Evidence-Based Practice: Case 1
           Healthcare professionals are constantly making decisions on how to best produce the best healthcare outcomes for their patients. To make informed decisions about the patient, healthcare professionals adopt an evidence-based practice (EBP) approach. According to Mackey and Bassendowski (2017), an EBP approach is an approach that involves the integration of clinical expertise and patient preferences with the best and current evidence to make more informed clinical decisions and improve patient outcomes. EBP encourages healthcare professionals to not only rely on their knowledge and expertise about a health condition but to also rely on research. This involves taking a patient-centered approach to the utilization of research. As such, an understanding of EBP and its implementation is an essential competency for every healthcare professional (Saunders et al., 2019). This is especially important because the healthcare environment is constantly changing in terms of changing healthcare needs of patients, technological advancement, and changes in disease patterns. Healthcare professionals need to keep up with these changes and the best way to do so is to ensure they are up to date with scientific evidence and can apply this evidence to patient care. Also, as part of their EBP competencies, healthcare professionals need to understand what is considered the best evidence for EBP. According to Mackey and Bassendowski (2017), systematic reviews are the most reliable source of best evidence, followed by randomized controlled trials. However, these should be used in addition to healthcare professionals’ experience and opinions as well as patient preferences to inform healthcare decisions.
           This paper involves the examination of a case study titled “an extended stay.” The case involves a 64-year-old man who had a prolonged hospital stay due to communication and system failures within the hospitals (Institute for Healthcare Improvement, n.d.). The goal is to examine how the EBP steps can be utilized in this scenario to address the failures and improve the delivery of care and patient outcomes. 
EBP Steps
Step 1
           The first step of EBP involves asking a question. For this case, two key questions will be asked based on the problems that have been identified in the case.
1 In a hospital setting, what is the impact of a standardized hand-off protocol among healthcare professionals compared to the current hand-off on patient safety and staff communication?
2 In a hospital setting, does a computerized medication system when compared to a non-computerized system reduce medication errors?
Step 2
           The second step involves identifying evidence to answer the questions. The evidence identified to answer the two questions will be integrated into the paper. The articles by Muller et al. (2018), Alimenti et al. (2019), Prgomet et al. (2017), and Gates et al. (2021) have been identified as the ev...