(^10) Johns Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice: Model and Guidelines, Third Edition
Governments and society challenge healthcare providers to base their practices
on current, validated interventions. In 2011, the director of the National Insti-
tutes of Health, Dr. Francis S. Collins, proposed the National Center for Advanc-
ing Translational Sciences, whose aim it is to accelerate the translation of scien-
tific discoveries into practice. The director of this exciting center, Dr. Christopher
Austin, announced new funding streams to strengthen translational science and
the movement of discovery concerning disease and patient outcomes into every-
day practice (Austin, 2016). Nursing has responded to the groundswell of infor-
mation by educating nurses at every level to be competent practitioners of EBP
and to close the gap between research and practice (Melnyk, Gallagher-Ford,
Long, & Fineout-Overholt, 2014).
EBP provides a systematic approach to decision-making that leads to best prac-
tices and demonstrates nurse accountability for the care they provide. When the
strongest available evidence is considered, the odds of doing the right thing at the
right time for the right patient are improved. Given the complexity of linking re-
search and clinical practice, EBP provides the most useful framework to translate
evidence into practice.
Knowing and Using Evidence
In healthcare, unfortunately, more is known than is practiced. The process of in-
corporating new knowledge into clinical practice is often considerably delayed.
Collins (2011) reports that it takes, on average, 13 years to approve new drugs.
The average time for the uptake of research into actual practice is 17 years
(Hanney et al., 2015). New knowledge has grown exponentially. Early in the
20th century, professional nurses had but a few, hard-to-access journals avail-
able to them. Today, MEDLINE indexes 5,600 journals (National Library of
Medicine, 2016) with more than 26 million references. The Cumulative Index to
Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) indexes more than 3,100 jour-
nals and includes more than 3.4 million records (Ebsco Publishing, 2016). Ac-
cessibility of information on the Web also has increased consumer expectation of
participating in treatment decisions. Patients with chronic health problems have