NURS440 Issues and Trends in Nursing

Week 2 Discussion

DQ1 How does the registered nurse use guided research in the clinical setting?

DQ2 Explore your clinical site and relate one quality improvement (QI) study currently being analyzed. What is benchmarked in the study? What role does the nurse play in the QI study?

 

MORE INFO 

How does the registered nurse use guided research in the clinical setting?

Introduction

The research process is a complex one. It can be difficult to know where to start when you’re trying to solve a problem or understand an issue in your clinical setting. You might be familiar with guided research, but do you know how it works? In this post, we’ll explore the steps involved in guided research and show you how it can help nurses sort through the evidence on their own terms.

Make sure that you understand the problem you’re trying to solve.

First, you need to know what the problem is. It’s important to define the goal of your research before starting so that you can measure success and learn from failure.

Here are some examples of goals:

• To improve patient satisfaction by reducing the time spent in waiting rooms or corridors between rooms (doctor’s office).

• To reduce the number of falls that occur in elderly patients who have been admitted for hip replacement surgery (hospital).

• To improve patient satisfaction by providing better access for people with limited mobility at an emergency department entrance door(hospital).

If these seem like lofty aspirations, don’t worry! You don’t have to achieve them all at once—they’re more about getting started than achieving a specific outcome.

Assemble relevant research articles.

As you begin your research, you’ll want to find a way to identify the relevant studies. The first step is usually to use a systematic review. This can be done by searching PubMed and then reading all of the articles that come up in response.

Next comes your clinical question: what do I need to know about this topic? Are there any articles that address my question? Are there any available resources on this topic at my school library or local public library?

Now that we’ve identified some potential sources of information, how do we find them? There are many ways to locate relevant research articles:

• Use a search engine such as Google Scholar (https://scholar.google Scholar/). It has thousands upon thousands of citations from academic journals available online; however, it may not include everything published each year so check back often!

• Use databases like MedlinePlus (http://www.nlm.nih .gov/medlineplus/lumen   ) which provide summaries on specific topics as well as full texts when available; these databases tend  to contain more recent information than older ones but depending on your field maybe not all topics will have been covered yet–check back frequently!

Summarize the information in the research articles.

The registered nurse should summarize the information in the research article.

First, they should summarize the results of each study. The registered nurse should be sure to include all of their findings, including any new information or conclusions that may not have been previously discussed in other articles or studies. They should also make sure to explain why these results are important and what they mean for future practice if they were implemented into practice (for example: “This study found that patients who took a medication called X had an improvement in their symptoms.”). Finally, it is important for the registered Nurse writer(s) to provide a conclusion on how this finding can be used in clinical practice (for example: “The results from this study suggest that taking Y could help alleviate pain symptoms”).

Synthesize information from the research articles to identify patterns and form conclusions.

Synthesizing information from the research articles to identify patterns and form conclusions.

Synthesis is a key part of research, both because it provides you with a way to organize your findings in a clear way, and because it helps you draw generalizations about what you’ve learned. For example, if one study found that people who were given an injection of vitamin B12 had lower levels of homocysteine (a blood test indicating risk for heart disease), then another study might use this finding as evidence that taking extra B12 could help prevent heart problems in older adults. You could also synthesize data from several studies by looking at them holistically—for example, if studies show that giving oral synbiotics reduces inflammation in the gut after antibiotics are used for surgery or infection treatment (1), does this mean we should all take these supplements? Not necessarily! However if there are multiple sources saying “yes,” then maybe we ought consider taking them ourselves just in case our immune systems need extra support when faced with foreign bodies like bacteria or viruses…

A guided research framework can help nurses sort out what the evidence says

A guided research framework can help nurses sort out what the evidence says.

Guided research is a systematic approach to finding, evaluating and synthesizing evidence in order to draw conclusions about what works. The basic idea behind guided research is to encourage inquiry into a problem or question through an investigation that aims at understanding its nature, causes, effects and implications for practice. It involves developing questions with a specific focus on providing answers related to the patient’s care needs (1).

A guided research framework guides you through this process while also helping you organize your findings so they can be used effectively in your clinical setting.

Conclusion

We hope that this post has given you a better idea of how guided research can be used in the clinical setting. As we’ve seen, it can help nurses identify patterns and draw conclusions from the evidence, which is an essential skill for any healthcare professional. That said, guided research doesn’t just help nurses make sense of their situation; it’s also a valuable tool for them to apply to their own practice as well. The process of synthesizing information from different sources (both online and off), synthesizing information with other professionals who specialize in relevant fields such as nursing or psychology—and finally applying this knowledge back on yourself so that you know how things really work—is a process that everyone should be doing all day long!