Columbia University School of Nursing & Beth Israel Medical Center

Evidence-Based Practice Nursing Program

• Patricia Stone, RN, MPH, PhD, Assistant Professor, Columbia University, School of Nursing
• Mary Walsh, RN, MSN, CNE, VP Patient Service & Chief Nursing Officer, Beth Israel Medical Center
• Mary O’Neil Mundinger, DrPH, Dean, Columbia University, School of Nursing

The Evidence-Based Practice Nursing Program partners students with staff nurses and clinician leaders into teams in order to implement and evaluate actual changes in nursing care delivery. The program aims to help nurses establish evidence-based practices (EBP) using the five-step process: 1) identify an actionable problem; 2) critically appraise available evidence; 3) recommend a clinical course of action; 4) implement the clinical change; and 5) evaluate the outcomes of that change.

To accomplish this, teams made up of two student nurses, one staff nurse and one clinical leader work on a year long project. To familiarize the teams with the EBP processes, all members participate in an Assessing Clinical Evidence (ACE) course. The course is designed to teach participants how to critically appraise the quality and applicability of published evidence and use a variety of electronic sources to access current best practice. In the ACE course, teams identify a project and obtain approvals as appropriate. Over the year, teams implement and evaluate their projects in the clinical setting.

Monitoring, evaluation and translation of data into useable information will be done on two levels. The first is the evidence-based projects themselves. Each project will have an evaluation plan tailored to the project with measurable clinical outcomes and/or resource utilization. Whenever possible the outcomes will be translated into dollars. The second level of evaluation is to assess the overall EBP project.