Educational interventions on evidence-based nursing in clinical practice: A systematic review with qualitative analysis

Aims: To gather, assess and synthesise the currently available evidence of educational interventions on evidence-based nursing (EBN).

Background: Previous systematic reviews have focused on the items used in reporting educational interventions for facilitating evidence-based practices in medicine and health care or teaching research literacy in nursing as well as on the outcomes of these interventions.

Design: A systematic review based on a procedure of the Centre for Reviews and Disseminations for conducting a systematic review of health interventions.

Data sources and methods: Texts from 2008 to 2015 were sought from the Cochrane, CINAHL and PubMed Medline databases. Eight studies were selected for the final data and reviewed for quality. Data were analysed with narrative synthesis including qualitative content analysis.

Results: Four main categories and sixteen subcategories were identified. The learning contents included principles of EBN and research, the process of EBN, and planning a change in practice. The most popular teaching/learning methods were lectures/didactic presentations and group work. The interventions encouraged learners to critically examine and evaluate their practice. The interventions also improved participants' capacity to identify the need for research evidence in clinical practice.

Conclusion: The educational interventions were fairly similar and had promising results. However, as the level of evidence was modest in the studies, there are several development needs for interventions and further research challenges. Interventions should provide participants with sufficient competences for implementing every step of EBN, with special focus on the implementation of evidence in patient care. The assessment of the outcomes of interventions should cover all learning categories of EBN with focus on medium to long-term effectiveness. The influence of different teaching/learning methods and learning contexts and settings should be investigated further.