How can we use systematic reviews to inform clinical practice?

Aims/purpose: Systematic reviews provide the highest quality evidence and inform clinical practice. For patient benefit, it is imperative that nurses keep abreast of evidence-based practice. This presentation highlights where to find systematic reviews and how the information presented can be used to inform care.
Presentation description: Clinical research is increasing at an incredible rate. In the clinical trials database alone, more than 2000 new studies are registered/month and this does not include qualitative studies that do not require registration. Keeping abreast of current evidence can not only be a time consuming process, but can be problematic when studies produce conflicting results. Systematic reviews can be useful for summarizing the increasing amount of knowledge that is gained from scientific papers. In addition, combining individual studies in a meta-analysis increases statistical power, resulting in more precise effect estimates. This presentation draws upon a few systematic reviews relevant to ICU nursing practice, highlights their findings and demonstrates how the information can be used to inform translation of evidence into practice. Additionally, although these reviews include steps to minimize bias, nurses should be aware of some of the biases that may reduce confidence in the findings.
Conclusion: Systematic reviews can be useful tools for informing evidence based practice, although careful interpretation is necessary for understanding their relevance to local practice.

Powers, liabilities and expertise in community safety: Comparative lessons for ‘urban security’ from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

This paper begins by outlining and critiquing what we term the dominant anglophone model of neo-liberal community safety and crime prevention. As an alternative to this influential but flawed model, a comparative analysis is provided of the different constitutional-legal settlements in each of the five jurisdictions across the UK and the Republic of Ireland (ROI), and their uneven institutionalization of community safety. In the light of this it is argued that the nature of the anglophone community safety enterprise is actually subject to significant variation. Summarizing the contours of this variation facilitates our articulation of some core dimensions of community safety. Then, making use of Colebatch’s (2002) deconstruction of policy activity into categories of authority and expertise, and Brunsson’s (2002) distinction between policy talk, decisions and action, we put forward a way of understanding policy activity that avoids the twin dangers of ‘false particularism’ and ‘false universalism’ (Edwards and Hughes, 2005); that indicates a path for further empirical enquiry to assess the ‘reality’ of policy convergence; and that enables the engagement of researchers with normative questions about where community safety should be heading.