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Introduction

An appraisal of a piece of research-based evidence relevant to healthcare practice. Evidence based practice is crucial to be reviewed to deliver high-quality care to every health care practise. EBP is practise based on evidence, Sackett defines EBP as the integration of best research evidence with clinical expertise and patient value.(Sackett DL 2000). Clinical practices can become out of date if no new evidence is drawn upon. EBP can a difficult and time-consuming task but it is essential to provide the best practise. Research based evidence is important in Podiatry so that practitioners and researchers can review medical evidence in order to show irregularities between clinical evidence and recognised practice. The context of EBP in healthcare increases the choice of the range of treatments and practises available; it is also meets the demands of patients? quality and effectiveness of treatment. To appraise the data,evidence must be found, this is achieved by generating an effective clinical question which then can be broken down in key terms to help with the search strategy. To form a clinical question the PICO method is used to break down the elements. P stands for patient or problem that is being considered. I is for assessment to what is trying to be found out or proven. C stands for comparison if relevant in trying to compare which method has the best outcome. O stands for the outcomes or outcomes of interest. These are the essential elements of defining a question. From the clinical question, key terms were picked in order to search for relevant data. ...read more.

Middle

This type of research takes the phenomenology approach which identifies phenomenon and gathers ?deep? information through inductive, qualitative methods. Phenomenology has roots in philosophy. It is concern with experience from the perspective of the individual. Phenomenological research has overlaps with other qualitative approaches such as ethnography. (Lester,S 1999). Ethnical issues have been considered in the research and the study was approved by ?The medical school ethical committee?. Researchers follow ethical rules such as confidentially to all participants and that they can withdraw at any time from the study.( Holloway I 2009) Participants were fully informed and a consent form was signed. Ethical controls are important, and the close relationship held in qualitative research between researcher and participant enables the researcher to focus closely on ethical issues to achieve empathy with the participants. The rigour in the research could be improved by using triangulation; triangulation tests the internal validity by using more than one method of data collection (Popay J 1998), in this study, this could have been improved by holding a group interview and having the transcripts checked by an independent party. However this is difficult to make sure it is achieved accurately as data collected using different methods can make to it difficult to directly compare such as comparing individual and group interviews and even more so for comparing qualitative and quantitative data. However contradictions to data compared in the qualitative approach do not necessarily threaten in the integrity of the data but can provide room for further research. Rigour is also concern with transferability which is comparable with external validity. ...read more.

Conclusion

There is many confounding research and views to hand hygiene which is another reason why student nurses have different ideas of acceptable hand hygiene. Therefore is it impossible that hand hygiene compliance will be 100%. In conclusion, findings cannot be fully generalised and 100% reliable due to limitations in the design previously discuss. The sample method could have affected validity of results, as it is not stated the sex and age of the participants in the study it can?t be generalised to different sub-groups and further research needs to be carried out in this area to generate more findings. Furthermore participants were employed through opportunity sampling; a disadvantage of this is that it can produce a biased sample, as it unknown whether the researcher picked people from their own social group. This sample would therefore not be representative of the target population showing bias. 2,580 words Barrett, R., Randle, J. 2008 1851-1857 Hand hygiene practices: Nursing students? perceptions. Journal of Clinical Nursing Dearnley Improving Health Through Nursing Research 2005 Lester, S (1999) ?An introduction to phenomenological research,? Taunton UK, Stan Lester Developments Lincoln Y.S. (1995) Emerging criteria for qualitative and interpretive research. Qualitative Inquiry 3, 275?289. Heneghan C, Badenoch D. Evidence-Based Medicine Toolkit [e-book]. BMJ Books; 2002 Immy Holloway (Bournemouth University), Stephanie Wheeler(Bournemouth University) 2009 ?Qualitative Research in Nursing and Healthcare, 3rd Edition? Popay J, Williams G, Rogers A.Rationale and standards for the systematic review of qualitative literature in health services research.Qual Health Res1998; 8:341?351. .Sackett DL, Strauss SE, Richardson WS, Rosengerg W, Haynes RB (2000). Evidence-based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM , Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh. Marshall,1996 M N. Sampling for qualitative research. Family Practice 1996; 13: 522-525. Williams, Hywel C 2003 Applying Trail Evidence Back to the Patient, September 2003 ...read more.

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