The Evidence-Based Practice Manual for Nurses

The Evidence-based Practice Manual successfully breaks down the skills for evidence-based nursing into manageable components. The reader will learn how to find, critically read and interpret a range of research studies, and will discover optimal approaches to helping patients reach decisions that are informed by the best-available evidence. The more-strategic concepts of developing an organisational evidence-based culture and making evidence-based changes at organisational level are the focus of the final section.

This book will be invaluable both for students and for qualified nurses who are reviewing their clinical practice, developing guidelines or protocols, undertaking systematic reviews, learning about research or carrying out a literature review to inform research.

• Step-by-step guide to finding, appraising and applying research evidence in nursing
• Teaches skills for successfully reviewing published literature:

• formulating a focused question
• developing a search strategy for efficient retrieval of relevant studies
• appraising the retrieved studies
• All examples are relevant to nurses and nursing
• Reflects contemporary nursing issues

• A new chapter on ‘Using research evidence in making clinical decisions with the individual patient’ provides practical guidance and tools for decision-making
• A new chapter on ‘Using evidence from qualitative studies’ explains the complexities of qualitative methodologies and methods in a simple, easily understood way
• Online exercises and solutions provide an opportunity to critically appraise studies with the following range of designs:

• • qualitative research
  • a randomised controlled trial
  • a cohort study
  • a case control study
  • a diagnostic test accuracy study
  • a systematic review
  • a clinical guideline
  • Example solutions are provided, all written by experts in the field.

Jean Craig is a research advisor with the Research Design Service of the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR RDS). This varied role entails working with nurses and other health care practitioners, methodologists, health care managers and members of the public to develop high quality, competitive research grant applications.
She has worked as a pediatric nurse in a variety of acute hospitals and settings including the renowned Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital, South Africa’s only dedicated child health institution, St Thomas’ Hospital in London and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, one of Europe’s largest children’s hospitals. There, her role as the integrated care pathway coordinator for the cardiac intensive care and other cardiac units provided her with hands-on experience of the challenges of initiating organizational evidence-based practice changes that required buy-in from people from different professions.
Her research career started in Liverpool where she worked as a research associate in the Evidence-Based Child Health Unit at the University of Liverpool, undertaking systematic reviews and contributing to the development of National clinical guidelines. She was a member of the Alder Hey Children’s NHS Trust Research Review Committee and helped to establish and run a Research Clinic at the Trust for clinicians developing research proposals. She established and led the Evidence-Based Practice Child Health module for post-graduates at the University of Liverpool. As a regional research adviser, she has an informal educational role in supporting learning about research methods. She is an independent member of the data monitoring and ethics committees for a number of trials, and a member of the trials adoption group for the Norwich Clinical Trials Unit.
Jean has published on a wide range of nursing topics. She is co-editor of the first three editions of The Evidence-Based Practice Manual for Nurses, and is a member of the editorial board for the journal Pilot and Feasibility Studies. Research from her PhD (obtained in Liverpool University, UK) about temperature measurement in infants and children was published in The Lancet and the British Medical Journal.