Nursing Research & Evidence-Based Practice Toolkit

One of the toughest parts of practicing evidence-based medicine is developing a good clinical question. Fortunately, there are many websites, worksheets, & tutorials on this topic.

Most clinical questions can be formulated in terms of a simple relationship between:

Consider the following scenario

Rick & Jaz must do background searching to see what if there are recommendations in guidelines, their organization, or if others have written about non-pharmacologic methods of pain and anxiety management in the PACU.

For Rick & Jaz, it makes sense for them to look at the AORN Guidelines (Association of Operating Room Nurses) to see if the guidelines have any non-pharmacological suggestions for improving the comfort of their perioperative patients.

A quick review of Complementary Care interventions shows Rick & Jaz that music may be an option.

When Rick & Jaz expand Music Interventions for perioperative patients, they learn that music is recommended by AORN and that there are evidence-based research articles on the topic.

This guideline is evidence-based, and the guidelines authors have included links to the articles they reviewed to make their determinations. You can use these article citations to find more articles on your topic by using the information searching technique Pearl Growing.

Rick and Jaz may also want to do a quick (10-15 minutes max) search on CINAHL (nursing & allied health database) and/or PubMed for recent (last 5 years) reviews, guidelines, or other evidence-based articles.  This searching will give Rick & Jaz and idea of what others have been doing (or not) on this topic.

After a little background research, Rick & Jaz can work on developing their PICO question (which may need to be revised after conducting a more in-depth literature review with the help of their librarians and learning what is feasible in their setting: budget, timing, staffing, etc.)

Below is Rick & Jaz's PICO question

Head over to Queenie the Question if you would like to Translate a PICO question into a Search Stragegy