My most challenging aspect in this course was that of searching for literature. Literature forms an integral component of all evidence-based projects by; helping a researcher and the audience to comprehend the complexity surrounding a clinical issue, providing insights on the scope of a clinical issue, and the best, most recent, evidence-based intervention strategies for the issue (Bramer et al., 2018). Without proper literature, a learner’s evidence-based practice project cannot progress. However, since there is a lot of published literature in this digital age, it calls for good skills to search for the most relevant literature to a clinical issue. If not done in a stepwise approach, the process can be tiring, time consuming, and easily result in disinterest or abandonment of the search. When a learner successfully accomplishes the step on literature search, the step on analysis and integration is easy.
The most rewarding aspect was learning how to formulate clinical questions using the PICOT-D tool. According to Eriksen & Frandsen (2018), allowing nurses to formulate interventions based on the clinical issues they identify from their areas of practice provides a good foundation for evidence-based practice they can relate with. Another rewarding aspect was learning more about plagiarism, referencing, and citation that purpose to acknowledge one’s dependence on another researcher’s work and to differentiate it from that of sources used by a researcher (Kumar, 2021).
The doctoral strategy that helped navigate this experience was obtaining knowledge on how to conduct a successful literature search; developing the PICOT clinical question, identifying databases and criteria to search for literature, conducting the search, selecting relevant articles, and organizing the findings in a literature evaluation table. Advocating for change is one of the roles of nurse leaders in practice and encompasses processes such as identifying an issue to address, developing goals, and strategies to address the issue (Eriksen & Frandsen, 2018). I will utilize the knowledge obtained in this course in such instances to search for literature for potential evidence-based solutions to address issues at community and population level for health promotion and disease prevention.
Bramer, W. M., de Jonge, G. B., Rethlefsen, M. L., Mast, F., & Kleijnen, J. (2018). A systematic approach to searching: an efficient and complete method to develop literature searches. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 106(4), 531.
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