The impacts of evidence-based databases workshops on nursing students' search skills improvement [MSc. thesis] (original) (raw)

Introduction: Nowadays, regarding to rapid growth of health sciences and the importance of medical information in patient care, it is necessary to provide nurses with up-to-date information for clinical activities. Despite the positive attitude of most nurses to evidence-based practice, one of the major barriers to implementing this process is the lack of information seeking skills. Therefore, the current study focused on determining the impact of using evidence-based databases training on improving search skills in nursing students, assuming that students' search skills would be different before and after the training. Methods: This quasi-experimental study was performed by designing a single group with pre- and post-tests. The students of four nursing fields were selected from the postgraduate students in September 2019 at Iran University of Medical Sciences. Pre-test and post-test, which included clinical questions, were taken before and after the educational intervention and students emailed their search strategies and the articles retrieved from PubMed and Embase databases to researcher. Then, the search strategies and results were evaluated by means of a researcher-made questionnaire which have 11 questions designed based on the checklist of Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies. Educational intervention was presented for 16 hours over eight two-hour sessions followed by some practical workouts by the students. Sixty percent of the search workouts included clinical questions that required an understanding of the evidence-based levels of medical studies. Results: The mean scores of students' performances after attending classes increased in different areas including keyword selection skill from 2.89 to 8.72, thesaurus use from 0.33 to 6.06, PICO question formulation from 3 to 8.11, using Boolean operators from 3.56 to 9.17, use of parentheses from 1.5 to 6.44, phrase search from 2.33 to 8.11, use of synonyms from 1.06 to 6.72, truncation from 0.07 to 2.06, field search from 1.44 to 5.72, search filters from 0.72 to 6.94, search strategy formulation from 13.78 to 53.28, and the evaluation of the relevance of search results to the posed questions from 28/89 to 86/67. Furthermore, the mean score of the students’ general search skill in evidence-based databases before training was 45/89 out of 200, which improved to 154/72 after training. The difference between the mean scores before and after the educational intervention was statistically significant (P <0.001) Conclusion: Training in the use of databases increases the search skills awareness of nursing students and affects the students' performance in applying these skills. Therefore, in order to implement the evidence-based practice, apart from providing the fundamental infrastructure to access databases in hospital settings, it is recommended to provide training concerning the use of these databases for the nurses and the nursing students with respect to their information needs. Keywords: search skills, nursing students, training, evidence-based databases