Improving patient care and outcomes is paramount to the practice of nursing. As we conclude our learning journey through our world of research and evidence-based practice, it is important to reflect upon your time spent in the course:

• Think about nursing practice and describe one barrier that you feel prohibits nurses from engaging in EBP; share one strategy you could use to facilitate the use of evidence to help improve nursing care for patients.
• Reflect back over your time in the course and describe how your thinking has changed about nursing research and evidence-based practice; describe one new learning during this course that you believe was the most helpful.

Solution:

With the increasing advancement of the nursing profession and practice, evidence-based practice (EBP) has become a necessity and a key contributor to improved patient health outcomes. However, the development of EBP has continuously been affected by different barriers, leading to its slow growth. One of these barriers is lack of time (Houser, 2018). Nursing practice is a significantly busy profession, with nurses working for long-hour shifts, mandatory overtime, and a high number of patients. This makes then constantly busy with providing patient care. The nurses do not have enough time to engage in EBP.