Nursing Experts: Translating the Evidence Phase 5 (NExT5)

The University of Illinois Chicago’s Library of the Health Sciences (LHS) and the College of Nursing have been engaged in a series of evidence-based practice (EBP) education programs targeted to public health, school health, acute and ambulatory care nurses.  These programs have expanded and built upon each other and used partnerships and connections towards providing equal access to biomedical information to all U.S. health professionals and the use of scientific evidence to guide healthcare decision-making. In Phases 1 and 2, the Nursing Experts: Translating the Evidence (NExT) project continued our long standing principle of enhancing professional practice by educating public health nurses on where to find free and reliable government resources, how to successfully use them for their specific information needs, and how to translate the information into practice. In Phase 3 we expanded these efforts to acute and ambulatory care nurses across the state and redesigned our online content to be engaging, visually appealing, and navigable across various screen sizes on mobile devices, tablets, and computers from multiple manufacturers. In Phase 4, we surveyed past participants to capture stories/narrative data from nurses who live in underserved communities to learn specifically about the challenges and the unfulfilled health information needs or barriers in these communities. Additionally, we expanded our promotion of EBP to underserved community hospitals, health departments, and clinical agencies across the state, NNLM Region 6 area, and nation by targeting these institutions and specific national nursing organizations and associations. To date, more than 800 public health/school nurses and 350 acute/ambulatory care nurses have benefited from our work. Nurses and public health professionals need to document and demonstrate that they engage in research and implement EBP to enhance healthcare quality, improve patient outcomes, and reduce costs. However, despite the explosion of scientific evidence, evidence-based care is not standard of care. Recent surveys of Magnet facilities and acute/ambulatory care nurses found low rates of EBP implementation in U.S. health care settings and nurses with insufficient knowledge to meet any of the 24 defined EBP competencies.1,2 Further, in 2012, the Institute of Medicine urged the US to make critical investments in the public health workforce to address decades of disinvestment 3,4. Between 2008 and 2019, local health departments lost 21% of their workforce capacity.5 Building on the success of our initial Phases, in the fifth Phase of this project, the NExT team has four objectives:  1) Expand the online NExT modules to include evidence-based practice content applicable to all public health professionals while continuing outreach to public health, school health, acute, and ambulatory care nurses; 2) Create an additional website link and path for the public health professional modules; 3) Continue and extend marketing/promotion of EBP to underserved community hospitals, health departments, and clinical agencies across the state, NNLM Region 6 area, and nation by targeting these institutions and specific national nursing and public health organizations and associations; 4) Continue the current public health and school health and acute and ambulatory care module design, navigation, social media presence and access to all nursing EBP modules and 5) Provide continuing education units for librarians, public health professionals, practicing acute/ambulatory care and public/school health nurses. Without interruption, UIC has continued its support of the materials created since 2010 and will continue to support the online NExT module website available at https://go.uic.edu/nextebp.