ESTABLISHMENT OF AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ACADEMIC HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER EBP PROGRAM
Rationale: There is an increased focus on health care being evidence and team-based. A mission of our academic health sciences center is to promote innovation in clinical practice through research. Promoting education and collaborations can be challenging in large academic centers where hospitals, clinics and academic disciplines often work in silos with competing goals. In our academic health center, there was a need to coordinate EBP resources and utilization.
Project description: Nursing administration from Health Sciences and the College of Nursing created a University hospitals and clinics-based nursing research committee charged to develop an environment that supports grass-roots EBP and quality improvement projects. The initial committee was comprised of hospital and unit-based nursing administration, nursing faculty, nursing staff members, and representatives from the health sciences library, quality improvement, value engineering, clinical education and the institutional review board. The committee identified three goals: 1) provide staff mentorship, 2) communicate projects organization-wide and 3) share resources. Committee members received EBP education and resource training and support. Initial organization wide efforts included establishing a quarterly EBP newsletter, mentoring clinical staff interested in conducting projects and presenting outcomes at professional conferences, partnering with the Daisy Foundation to recognize nurse EBP champions who excel in implementing EBP to improve care, and working with teh College of Nursing's Masters of Nursing Education students to review and evaluate other hospital-based EBP programs.
Outcomes: The initial work of the EBP committee resulted in other disciplines asking to participate in EBP committee to support team-based EBP projects. As a result, the committee transitioned into an interdisciplinary EBP council. An interdisciplinary EBP poster fair was hosted with broad transdisciplinary participation. A needs assessment conducted in conjunction with the poster fair identified EBP training needs (online EBP training modules, computer availability, literature search and citation management training, and communication of of available resources) and barriers (lack of management support, identifying collaborators, lack of knowledge, isolation of community clinics). Interestingly, time was listed as both a need and barrier to conducting EBP.
Conclusions: We have successfully built a core interdisciplinary EBP council. Our next steps will be to broaden our EBP efforts and develop a sustainable EBP education plan that can be shared across disciplines and our large academic health sciences center, including community clinics. A future goal is to support organizational partners across the region by utilizing distance learning technologies to provide EBP mentoring and collaborations..