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Oct
21
Posted by Darlene Kaskie on October 21st, 2021
Posted in: Blog, Funding, News from the Region, Outreach
Region 6 of the Network of the National Library of Medicine is pleased to announce the recipient of our Health Information Outreach Award for the performance period of October 2021 through April 2022. This award supports the mission and goals of the National Library of Medicine to support a highly trained workforce for biomedical and health information resources and data to advance research in medicine or consumer health reference and instruction; increase awareness, access, evaluation, and use of National Library of Medicine and other trustworthy health resources to inform personal health and wellness decisions; and provide health information access and health literacy training with a focus on Medically Underserved Areas (MUAs) and Underrepresented in Biomedical Research (UBR) populations for advancing health equity.
The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) College of Nursing Urbana Campus is receiving $19,999 for the project, Nursing Experts: Translating the Evidence Phase 4 (NExT4). Krista Jones, Director of UIC Nursing-Urbana Campus, has been engaged with the University of Illinois Chicago Library of the Health Sciences to create a series of evidence-based practice (EBP) education programs targeted to public health, acute and ambulatory care nurses. These programs have expanded and built upon each other and used partnerships and connections towards providing equal access to biomedical information to all U.S. health professionals and the use of scientific evidence to guide healthcare decision making. To date, more than 700 public health and 300 acute/ambulatory care nurses have benefited from the project.
Nurses need to document and demonstrate that they engage in research and implement EBP to enhance healthcare quality, improve patient outcomes, and reduce costs. However, despite the explosion of scientific evidence, evidence-based care is not standard of care. Recent surveys of magnet facilities and acute/ambulatory care nurses found low rates of EBP implementation in U.S. health care settings and nurses with insufficient knowledge to meet any of the 24 defined EBP competencies.
The Nursing Experts: Translating the Evidence (NExT) project aims to continue their long tradition of enhancing professional practice by educating public health nurses on where to find free and reliable government resources, how to successfully use them for their specific information needs, and how to translate the information into practice. In the fourth phase of this project, the NExT team has four objectives: 1) Extend marketing/promotion of EBP to underserved community hospitals, health departments, and clinical agencies across the state of Illinois, the NNLM Region 6 area, and the Nation by targeting these institutions and specific national nursing organizations and associations, 2) Survey participants to capture stories/narrative data from nurses who live in underserved communities to learn specifically about the challenges and the unfulfilled health information needs or barriers in these communities, 3) Improve the current module design, navigation and access to all EBP modules based on feedback received from NExT 3, and 4) Continue to provide Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for practicing acute/ambulatory care and public/school health nurses. Without interruption, UIC has continued its support of the materials created since 2001 and will continue to support the online NExT module websites available at https://go.uic.edu/phnext and https://go.uic.edu/acnext.
Recognizing the partners in support of this program are Carle Health, Graham Hospital System, Northwest Community Hospital North Shore, the Champaigne-Urbana Public Health District, and the Vermilion and Southern Seven County Health Departments.
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