Hospitals and healthcare systems around the world have attempted to build and sustain evidence-based practice (EBP) cultures and environments, yet they have struggled to clearly understand what EBP competency means.

In “Implementing the Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) Competencies in Healthcare,” EBP leaders Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk, Ellen Fineout-Overholt, and Lynn Gallagher-Ford discuss EBP competencies for practicing nurses and advanced practice nurses, outline methods to achieve the competencies, and highlight strategies for implementation in real-world clinical practice settings in a user-friendly guidebook format.

In the United States, EBP has been recognized as a key factor in meeting the Quadruple Aim in healthcare, which improves the patient experience of care, the health of populations, and the work life for clinicians, as well as reduces the per capita cost of healthcare. Despite its tremendous positive outcomes, EBP is still not the standard of care in healthcare systems throughout the United States and the rest of the world. As a result, many research-based interventions or treatments have never been used in clinical settings even though they have been proven to improve healthcare outcomes.

“Competence in the EBP process is essential for clinicians to achieve sustainable evidence-based change, which is what guarantees us best practices and therefore, best outcomes,” Fineout-Overholt said. 

The book is available at http://www.nursingknowledge.org/sttibooks.

More information about STTI can be found online at www.nursingsociety.org.