Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

It can take many years for the latest research evidence to be incorporated into everyday nursing practice. As a result, there remains a gap in health care between what is known and what is practiced. This has prompted increasing interest into strategies which can be used to enhance nurses' use of evidence to guide practice in health care settings where patients receive care. One such strategy is facilitation. Facilitators support and enable practitioners to recognize what it is they need to change in practice and identify how to go ahead in making these changes to incorporate evidence into practice. The strategy has not been studied extensively related to implementing evidence in nursing, especially from a practical perspective (i.e. how to perform facilitation). The focus of this research project is to investigate how facilitation is carried out at the point of care in a real world situation where a guideline to improve practice is being implemented for nurses. Two nurse facilitators are helping a group at a cancer institute in Midwestern Canada to implement a guideline for nurses which outlines the best and latest nursing care for wounds in patients with breast cancer following radiotherapy treatment. The study will follow the group through the process of implementing the guideline with a focus on what facilitators are actually doing to help make changes in nursing practice, the barriers they encounter in the process, and the lessons learned throughout their journey. This more comprehensive understanding of facilitation will lay the groundwork for the design of practical strategies for nurses to increase their use of evidence and research in practice.