Evidence-based nursing strategies and their implementation – Nursing Education Network

Glarcher, M., Ferguson, C., Patch, M., Steven, A., & Vaismoradi, M. (2024). Strategic rollback: Strengthening patient safety by eliminating low-value care practices. A contemporary nurse1-5.

Low value care:

“There is a gap between evidence-based care and the everyday challenges health care workers face. This disparity highlights the need to address ineffective care, minimize harm, and maximize the effectiveness of health care interventions.”

Strategies to phase out low-value practices:

1. Removal
2. Exchange
3. Reduction
4. Limitation

Culture of change:

“Regardless of the type of intervention used, the goal should be to change health care workers’ behavior based on well-tested theories or frameworks.”

The challenge in nursing is to balance mandatory practices, equivalent to completing and documenting multiple safety-oriented screening tools, and ensuring evidence-based practice. Generic, standardized safety approaches used in numerous clinical settings can also not be appropriate to fulfill the needs of specific patient populations.

Possibilities:

Audit and research initiatives for nurses to look at, evaluate and challenge low-value and ineffective practices are highlighted. Following the identified need for collaboration across interdisciplinary professions, regular audits and feedback mechanisms to discover and end the implementation of low value care.

Nursing Education Network. (2017). De-implementation of practice.

Nursing Education Network. (2017). Diffusion of innovations.