The Importance of Evidence-Based Practice

This paper is an academic critique of an article written by Niharika, Rahmi Choudhary and Poonam Sharma (2017) titled: An Analytical Study on Practices Regarding Injection Administration among Staff Nurses. The authors tackle a particular study to assess the practices of staff nurses with injection administration. This article critique is focused on examining the structure in which the authors wrote and performed their research.

In their article, An Analytical Study on Practices Regarding Injection Administration among Staff Nurses, Niharika, Choudhary and Sharma (2017) shared an analytic quantitative research that was based on a non-experimental approach to randomly select a nursing staff from a nonspecific hospital.

In their introduction to the article the authors reiterate the importance of patient safety. To ensure good quality care towards patients, nurses must adapt evidence based practices in all they do. One of the most important task as a nurse is medication administration.

There are many steps that goes on before a patient receives their medication but the final act goes to the nurse. The doctor orders the medications, the pharmacy verify the medication and the nurse administers the medication. The final error goes to the nurse, the last hands the medication goes through is the nurse. So, medication administration is a very important skill that nurses must master. This is the reason for the authors research. The research itself is based on the need to analyze nurse’s skills with different tasks. There is no research question but a statement of belief taken up by the authors. This belief frames their purpose.

In their research, Niharika et al. (2017) focused on the statement of medication administration and the importance of it as a nurse. Their problem is patient safety and the many aspect that it entails. But their main focus of this experiment is medication administration, specifically injection administration. There is no specific question, hypothesis, or statement offered by the author, just a generalized view that nurses have a great responsibility with medication administration. The experiment is suitable to evaluate if nurses generally are using the appropriate technique to administer injections.

The authors of the experiment used 100 staff nurses working in a 205-bedded random private hospital of district Mohali. The information was collected using observational checklist. They compared the practices of the nurses with relevant up to date evidence based practice. The target was specifically to nurses. The eligibility criteria were specific; they used staff nurses that were available at the time and willing participants. Exclusions were areas that researchers could not be while injection administration were being done because of the overlapping time at other injection administrations (Niharika et al., 2017).

A formal consent was obtained from all necessary organizations and a written informed consent was obtained from the staff nurses. The data was collected by the researchers and authors of the article. The data was collected using an observational checklist. The results are clear but the specific tool used to measure or observed, such as the checklist, is not clearly described. What is clearly described is the technique used by the nurses and how they correlate with the best evidence based practice. The technique is precise in regard to how injection administration of medication is supposed to be done using a specific evidence base practice by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Interpretation, Discussion and Clinical Application

All-important results were discussed. Out of 100 staff nurses observed for injection administration, 70 staff nurses administered intravenous injection and 30 staff nurses administered intramuscular injection. The collected data was compared to the correct evidence based practices. The experiment showed that most of the staff nurses 28 (93.3%) was performing good intramuscular injection administration practices and 36 (51.4%) staff nurses had good intravenous injection administration practices.

The study also showed that there is no relation when it comes to intramuscular and intravenous injection administration practices with age, gender, educational qualification, area of work or work experience. A total of 43 literatures were referred to for analytic purposes. The authors did not have a specific conclusion. They state that they will create an informational booklet on injection administration to be given to the nurses at the hospital (Niharika et al., 2017).

This research and article brought some light to the importance of ?medication administration. In this research, it showed that majority of nurses knows evidence base practices. Although, experiments do not always show the exact facts that are actually out there in the world. This particle experiment for example can be manipulated by the participants. A person that is being observed most times automatically try and do the correct thing and not what they usually do when someone else is not looking.

This experiment and article only proves that the majority of nurses know evidence based practices but it does not prove that nurses are actually practicing evidence based research. Three good follow-up research questions that could be investigated are: Are nurses identifying medication errors when they occur? Or upon administering of an intramuscular injection, should a nurse aspirate the syringe or not, what are the implications involved? Or does the use of alcohol impregnated port cap decrease the infection rate in patients verses without using the alcohol impregnated protector?

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