Nursing is a profession accountable to society for providing high quality cost-effective care for patients and their families (Burns & Grove, 2007). This assignment will define evidence based practice and its significance in the nursing process. In addition, it will critically analyse the research article ‘Community Psychiatric Nurses’ experience of working with people who engage in deliberate self harm carried out by Thompson et al (2008). Furthermore it will define Hierarchy of Evidence and its importance in research studies. A clinical question has been formulated using Population, Intervention, Comparison and Outcome (PICO) and the key words in the article to search for another article which support or contradicts the main review article.
Brown defines evidence based practices as the use of the best quality research to deliver an effective quality of care in the best interest of the patient as well as promoting cost effectiveness within the healthcare system (Brown, 1999). In order for health care professionals to deliver the best quality of care, they need to use the combination of evidence based clinical treatments and practices (Lindsay, 2007).
Evidence based knowledge is important as it guides and maintains the clinical competencies of health care practitioners and provides a research based explanations to assist patients in the process of clinical decision making (Burns and Grove, 2007). According to Ciliska et al (2005), the skills necessary to provide evidence based solution to a clinical dilemma includes defining the problem, conducting the effective research to locate the best evidence, critically appraising the evidence and considering that evidence and its implications in the context of patients’ circumstances and values.
Research into the experience of community psychiatric nurses working with people who engage in deliberate self-harm was carried out using the qualitative research design, as it is primarily concerned with understanding human beings experiences in a humanistic, interpretive approach (Ronald et al, 2007). The purpose of the research was to understand CPNs’ experience while they are working with people who deliberately self-harm. In this research it was found suitable as it relies less on non numerical data.
A study by Playle (2000) suggest that readers need to read, critically study and evaluate a research article to demonstrate their understanding of research and to identify implications for practice. In this study, Tarling and Crofts (2002)’s framework and The Critical Appraisal Skill Programme (CASP) accessed on http://www.phru.nhs.uk/Pages/PHD/CASP.htm has been used to review the strength, credibility, validity and weakness of the above study.
The title “Community Psychiatric nurses’ experience of working with people who deliberately self-harm is clear, concise and informative as it reflects the contents of the whole study. Informative titles are important in research process as it allows the reader to identify the research approach (Roe and Webb, 1999), however the title does not reveal the approach which may be seen as a weakness (Dempsey and Dempsey, 2000).
The authors of this article are qualified professional with clinical and psychological expertise as well as experience of working with people with mental health problems as Dempsey and Dempsey (2000) suggests that authors should be qualified to carry out a research study and their qualifications should be verified if need be. This may be seen as powerful, hence reliability and credibility of this article is not questionable as they will be perceived as professionals with clinical credibility to eliminate bias (Hoskins et al, 2005). However it can be argued that the community psychiatric nurses had not undertaken psychotherapy training although they had a minimum of eighteen years of experience (Thompson et al, 2008).