Nursing Experts: Translating the Evidence Phase 4 (NExT4)

The University of Illinois Chicago’s Library of the Health Sciences and the College of Nursing have been engaged in a series of evidence-based practice (EBP) education programs targeted to public 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 one and two, the Nursing Experts: Translating the Evidence (NExT) project continued our long tradition 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. To date, more than 700 public health and 300 acute/ambulatory care nurses have benefited from our work. Nurses 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 Building on the success of our initial phases, in the fourth phase of this project, the NExT team has four objectives:  1) Extend marketing/promotion of EBP to underserved community hospitals, health departments, and clinical agencies across the state, Region six area, and nation by targeting these institutions and specific national nursing organizations and associations, 2) Survey 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, 3) Improve the current module design, navigation and access to all EBP modules based on feedback received from NExT 3, and 4) Continue to provide Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for practicing acute/ambulatory care and public/school health nurses. Without interruption, UIC has continued its support of the materials created since 2001 and will continue to support the online NExT module websites available at https://go.uic.edu/phnext and https://go.uic.edu/acnext.