Healthcare is constantly evolving to keep up with the most scientifically supported approaches to achieving good patient outcomes. Evidence-based practice is a concept that fully embraces that essential healthcare truth. Every patient is an individual and every individual requires personalized considerations when making health-related decisions.
In this article, we take a look at what evidence-based practice is, how it works, and what careers use it.
What is Evidence-Based Practice?
One would hope the phrase is a bit of a redundancy—at least in this context. What is healthcare work, after all, if not evidence-based? While doctors and nurses have always leveraged their training and factual understanding of medicine to achieve the best possible healthcare outcomes, they haven’t and don’t always apply the “evidence-based” approach being described here.
Evidence-based healthcare is a very specific research-centric process in which care providers identify a clinical problem or question and take steps to investigate and address it. It’s time-consuming because it is very individualized. The “clinical problem,” is not necessarily transferable.
If two patients come in with congestive heart failure, the evidence-based research cycle may take place for both of them because there are other variables that will influence their outcome.
Because evidence-based practice is very research-demanding in an industry that often has little to nothing to spare it is not always applied consistently. However, it has been shown to produce good results, both for individual patients and in the way healthcare providers think about the services that they offer.
While there aren’t a lot of careers born specifically out of evidence-based practice, there are many that have been influenced by it.
It is now a concept that is taught both in nursing and medical school. It is particularly prominent in advanced curriculums. For example, if you wish to become a:
- Family Nurse Practitioner
- Neo-Natal Nurse Practitioner
- Nurse Midwife
- Gerontological Nurse
You will probably deal routinely with evidence-based practice. Unfortunately, because it is a very demanding practice, it isn’t a solution that hospitals can leverage in all situations. However, it remains a desirable framework through which healthcare providers can filter and inform their decisions.
Informatics Nursing
Informatics nurses work primarily with numbers. They record and process healthcare data as a way to better strategize for individual patients and to provide broader solutions that can influence a hospital’s overall operations.
They are an enormous resource when it comes to maximizing efficiency. Hospitals that are short-staffed or not funded adequately can make the most of what resources they do have by understanding their numbers.
While informatics nursing has existed for years, it is a career path that evolves constantly and is more prominent than ever now that AI and other data-processing tools have made it more accessible.
Informatics nursing was not born of evidence-based practice but it certainly operates in the same arena, providing hospitals with the tools required to leverage factually-supported decisions.
What is the Quickest Way to Become a Nurse?
If you are interested in joining the world of healthcare, you are probably wondering—what is the quickest way to become a nurse? Nursing is a very popular career pivot because you can get certified relatively quickly—particularly if you already have a college degree.
People heading to college for the first time will often need to deal with pre-requisite classes that significantly increase the time and money they spend on school. If you have your degree, you can skip those requirements and enter an “accelerated program.”
Just how accelerated that program is will depend largely on your capacity, and what opportunities are available near you. Often, people who are able to fully commit may complete their educational requirements in 12-18 months. From there, you just need to pass the NCLEX—nursing’s big, bad, standardized test—to get a job in the world of healthcare.
If you are interested in a more advanced nursing career— for example, one that requires a graduate degree— you may still be able to “bundle,” your education in a direct-to-hire package. These curriculums are designed to allow students to complete their undergraduate and graduate work in a self-contained period, sometimes shorter than getting just an undergraduate degree would have been.
It takes most people 6-7 years of college to get their undergraduate and graduate degrees. Through an accelerated program, people who already have their undergraduate degree may be able to do everything in around three years.
This opens a lot of doors, both in terms of salary expectations and in the job that you will ultimately be qualified for. Many times, nurses who want to specialize in very specific fields must get their master’s degree to do it.
There are so many paths to becoming a healthcare worker. Research what opportunities are available to you, and figure out the strategy that feels most accessible. The key is to strike a balance between efficiency and quality of life. Everyone is a little bit different in terms of how they do with school work, and accelerated programs are—well. Accelerated. Choose the pace that works for you.
As a future healthcare worker, avoiding burnout will be just as important a skill as anything they teach you in nursing school.
Conclusion
Evidence-based care practices are just one of the many modern concepts influencing the direction of healthcare. Digital technology, for example, is shaping the field as much as anything else. Hospitals all over the country are looking for administrators and even doctors and nurses with a good grip on software solutions that can help improve patient outcomes and improve efficiency.
There are tons of ways to get into healthcare. Find the career that suits your interests, skills, and passions, and go from there.
Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.