The definition of evidence-based practice that was created during the professional roles and values is still applicable even after completing Course C361 Evidenced based practice and Nursing Research. The field of medicine and the profession of Nursing is constantly changing and ability to adapt will highly depend on a nurses ability to utilize current evidence and literature when brining forth changes to procedures and protocols. Evidence based practice and research will be the shining beacon of hope for the successful navigation of the modern health care environment. Cost reducing measure and improved patient outcomes will be areas that will need to addressed as the baby boomer population ages. The ability to understand and analyze data and research will be an important feat and task for the profession of nursing. In order for a change in practice to take place there must be a substantial amount of sound and credible evidence that warrants the change.

The evidence based practice course was very insightful and very empowering as this course allowed for a better understanding of literature and importance of evidence and support to make changes in practice. The ability to differentiate between the different levels of research will significantly improve patient care at the bedside. Using the numerous academic resource sites played a substanial role in successful completition of course. The definition of the course can also be attributed to the artifacts that will discussed in the nex section. The program cemented the importance of Evidence-based practice.

Relevancy and Beliveabilty of Data

Nurse's must be able identify and analyze data based on the type of study and or experiment and the controls that were in place. The ability to kidentifying confounding variables will be an important attribute because lurking varaibles may significantly impact data. The ability to identify flaws in study or sample size or data collection can help to ensure the data is credible. The date of the collection of data should also also be analyzed to determine if it is still relevant to the desired project. Sample size also play a role in the belivabiltiy of data.

Quality Improvement and Research

Quality improvement is a continous process that looks to identify areas of strenghts and weakness and examines ways to improve upon current model. Discharge teaching and bedside pharmacist education is one area that can be evlauated for improvement. How long is taking the pharamicst to educate the patient on discharge medications. Is there a better way to speed up the process and how can we measure the change. Quality Improvement is an important area in healthcare that will be required more in the future. To curb health costs, improvment measure will be needed.

Research is another area that may look to test an intervention or gather information on a problem. Research can be either primary and or secondary. The aim of research and utilizations of experiments is to test interventions and or other hypothesis. Research can be either primary or secondary and it hopes to answer a question. Research has numerous clinical implications in the field of nursing and health care. The following section will identify the differences between primary and secondary resources.

Primary research vs Secondary research and clinical implication

 As a nurse it will be important to look for peer reviewed articles that are less than five years old when wanting to find current evidence for a potential change in practice. The ability to anaylze and differentiate between primary and secondary research will be through utilization of an evidence guide or the ability to differentiate between the two based on the characteristics of a primary research. A randomized controlled trial or RCT is known to be primary research because it has a control group, the participant's are randomly selected to alleviate potential bias, and the implementation of an independent variable. Primary research can also be in the form of pilot studies and quasi-experiemental studies.

Secondary reserarch is research that was not directly preformed by the author. If an author wants to do a comparrision of two RCT's to determine the effectivness of a set of interventions this would be considered to be secondary research. The quality of this reserach may be higher than primary research so it will be important to differnicate the level of quality when identifying literature that can be utilized for changes in practice. A systematic review or a meta-anlysis of literature may yield a higher level of quality than a primary research resource.

The ability to criticaly appraise evidence will b