Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing

The Evidence-Based Practice Manual successfully breaks down the skills required 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 towards 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 the organisational level are addressed in the final chapter. This popular book comes with helpful online exercises including NCLEX questions for the US readership.

• Helps students learn to read and understand research results as a foundation for evidence-based practice
• Easy writing style makes a potentially difficult subject accessible and enjoyable
• Explains how to search the literature and rank it according to the strength of its evidence
• Case studies, scenarios and exercises ‘bring the subject to life’
• Clearly explains the process of critical appraisal – quality of the study, interpretation of the results, and applicability of the findings to individual patients
• Explains the various means of applying data from population studies to the individual
• Offers practical advice on how to communicate risks and benefits to patients
• Contains a glossary of useful terms

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.