Evaluating psychiatric nurses' awareness of evidence-based nursing publications

Background: Research has shown that nurses lack skills to find and appraise research literature, lack time and organisational support to utilise research, and need user-friendly research material to implement evidence-based health care in practice. In Sweden, the concept of evidence-based health care has been introduced by The Swedish Council on Technology Assessment in Health Care (SBU), a concept which the nursing profession quickly adopted. This study was initiated synchronously with the publication of two reports on evidence-based nursing (EBN) in psychiatric care. Aim: To investigate the dissemination and awareness of literature on EBN among psychiatric nurses in Sweden, and more specifically whether nurses were aware of the EBN reports. Methods: A postal questionnaire was used with a prospective pre-post design. A questionnaire was constructed and distributed to the members in The National Association of Psychiatric Nurses at two occasions - before publication of the two reports and 1 year post-publication. The questionnaire was initially circulated to 2,294 nurses. The response rate for the first distribution was 82% and for the second 72%. Results: Although the results demonstrate an increase in awareness concerning the concept of EBN and access to literature between data collection, there were still many nurses who reported no access to the literature. The reported use of literature in practice was scarce; however, findings demonstrated an increase in opinion about the value of using literature in practice. Conclusions: The findings of this study demonstrate that the dissemination of literature in EBN, as well as EBN literature in psychiatric care, still requires considerable development to assure its use in practice. Implications: The diffusion and dissemination of evidence-based literature within nursing must be guided by a structured plan followed by concrete examples of its implication(s) for practice.