Zeitschrift für Krankenpflege und Pflege

Barriers of Implementing Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing Profession: A Literature Review

Abstract

Maram Banakar, Munirah Alatawi, Eman Aljuhani, Fatimah Alsufiany, Kawakeb Aleid, Rehab Rawah and Sara Aljanabi

Background: Evidence-based practice is important in improving the overall quality of patient care, enhancenursing practice and increase the confidence in decision-making. Evidence-based practice is a technique used insolving clinical issues regarding patient care by integrating well-designed evidence with patient preferences, patientassessments and health professionals. The aim of this review is to explore barriers that confront nursing in theimplementation of Evidence-based practice. Consequently, by determining some of the barriers to the implementationof EBP among nurses, health care systems can form solutions that allow the health centers to avoid such issues andexecute the approach among health care providers.

Methods: peer review was undertaken following literature search in the databases involved CINAHL, MEDLINEand EBSCO Web of Science databases. Included studies were from October 2018 to December 2018, Englishlanguage and peer-reviewed studies that aimed to explore the organizational and individual barriers within healthcaresetting. Quality appraisal tool was used to appraise all the included studies.

Results: A total of 12 studies were included. Six studies were quantitative, five studies were qualitative, and onestudy used mixed methods. Four organizational barriers to implement Evidence-based practice among nurses werefound by reviewing the literature which are (“lack of support and supervision”, “lack of training” and “education”, “limitedresources” and “time restriction”). While, four main themes were considering as an individual barrier to implementingEvidence-based practice among nurses: (“lack of nurses’ knowledge”, “skills and awareness regarding use theEvidence-based practice”, “lack of professional characteristic”, “nurses’ personal attitude and experience in using” and“language barrier in using or implementing Evidence-based practice”).

Conclusion: Nursing administrators and educators have the main role to facilitate evidence-based practiceimplementation among nurses, therefore; the findings of this review can help to overcome the identified barriers.Training and education are important to enhance knowledge and skills of nurses to use evidence based in practice.Time management, providing the required resources and adequate supervision can facilitate the implementation ofevidence-based practice which positively influence the quality of care.

Recommendations: For further research, it is very fruitful to investigate the common barriers of EBP in one specificculture such as the middle eastern culture. Furthermore, the future research may focus on barriers of implementingEBP related to the patients and their family.