Today's Hours
NUR 322 focuses on examination and application of clinical scholarship through evidenced based practice. Emphasis is on skills for research applied to clinical practice.
It is desirable to learn
Implementing Evidence-Based Practice for Nurses by Use PICO to develop a clear idea what information you are seeking. PICO was developed by faculty at McMaster University.
|
P Population/Patient/Problem |
What group will be acted upon? What group will experience the change in order to become better? |
|
I Intervention |
What change is being done to the population? |
|
C Comparison |
Changed from what? To what is the change being compared? |
|
O Outcome |
What is the desired effect or result of the change on the population? |
|
T Time |
What is the time frame to see the effect? Short term or long term effects? (not always included in a PICO) |
PICO is a tool to help you organize your thoughts and formulate a search strategy. Use the components to break your research question down into parts and enter them in an appropriate manner into a search of your database.
In summary you are trying to make a change (the Intervention) from some other old way (the Comparison) for someone (the Population) to make things better in some way (the Outcome).
Be flexible! Different databases may require different methods to limit to specific population groups. And realize that you may be interested in an intervention's effects on pregnant women, but little research may have been done on pregnant women due to ethical and safety reasons. (If so, look for the next best thing--research on the effects on women or whatever populations have been studied. Then extrapolate the known effects to propose what is likely to happen to pregnant women, the unknown. Remember to acknowledge the extrapolation.)
