Nursing Information (original) (raw)

Research and Theory for Nursing Practice, 2003

Abstract

Cursing practice is an information-intensive process. Nurses spend about 25% of their time collecting and using information (The Audit Commission, 1995). Though they are already fairly well skilled in acquiring and using information, the changing nature of nursing and health care means the that informatics competencies required have changed and are more prominent than in the past. New information about health care is being generated at an explosive rate. Estimates show that 5 years after a nursing student graduates from school more than 50% of the knowledge acquired will be obsolete. (McCormick, 1984). Nurses need to continually update their knowledge, and this requires informatics competencies. The recent emphasis on evidence-based health care has contributed to this exponential growth in new knowledge. Evidence-based practice encompasses the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence based on systematic reviews of all available evidence-including patient-reported, clinician-observed, and research-derived evidence-in making and carrying out decisions about the care of individual patients. The best evidence, moderated by patient circumstances and preferences, is applied to improve the quality of clinical judgments (The National Center for Clinical Audit, 1997). By focusing on the nurse's role in evidence-based practice we can identify relevant informatics competencies required to formulate, access, interpret, utilize, and disseminate evidence. To formulate evidence, nurses must be competent in creating new knowledge. Research is an information-intensive activity involving identifying variables, collecting data to test hypotheses, developing survey tools to collect information to explore views, manipulating data with statistical techniques to reveal true answers, being able to analyze and interpret data in an objective way, and then presenting that data in a meaningful way to support the conclusions. Once that evidence is in the public domain, nurses need to be able to access it. They must have knowledge of the plethora of information sources from primary literature to government statistics in order to access the wide range of sources of evidence. Much of this evidence is accessible via literature databases. Nurses therefore need information retrieval skills to ensure that they know where and how to access relevant evidence. This requires an understanding of search terms and techniques to ensure appropriate specificity and sensitivity of the information retrieved. Nurses should develop skills in questioning and assessment techniques to obtain relevant information from patients in order to identify patients' problems and needs.

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