Research: the way to quality care.

Abstract

The goal of all health care professionals is to provide quality patient care and thus optimize patient outcomes. To ensure that we are providing the highest quality, most efficacious, and most cost-effective care to our patients, on what do we base our patient care decisions? The answer is research. Research is a dynamic process, resulting in newer and better ways of providing care. Research has been defined as a diligent and systematic evaluation of defined variables to validate current knowledge or to gain new knowledge.1 Research generates a scientific body of knowledge and helps to test and create theories upon which health care providers base their patient care interventions. According to the American Nurses’ Association Cabinet on Nursing Research, research is an important component of professional nursing practice.2 Historically, health care professionals, especially nurses, work from a knowledge base grounded in tradition and authority, gained by borrowing from other disciplines, trial and error, intuition, personal experience, role modeling, and reasoning. Although each of these activities makes an important contribution to the knowledge base, it is critical that we are able to state that certain facts are known as the result of research that has been clearly defined and evaluated. Research has been confined for too long in an academic setting, with physicians and those with doctorates not only performing most of the studies but also applying the research findings in their practices. It is time for all health care professionals to become involved in implementing research protocols as well as in incorporating research results into practice. The research process is much like the nursing process and involves the following activities: questioning, planning, observing, analyzing, explaining, and implementing. Research can be qualitative (the findings are specific to the subjects being evaluated) or quantitative (the findings can be generalized to a population larger than the one studied), depending on the question being asked and how the data are analyzed. Research can also be prospective or retrospective; a prospective research design is more powerful than a retrospective one because controls can be specifically chosen to help lessen interactions among variables. With retrospective research, one is simply evaluating what has already occurred. However, a retrospective design is the most appropriate design when performing research to determine the outcomes of current interventions. For successful clinical research to take place, a research protocol must first be compiled. As explained by Saunderlin,3 “The research proposal creates the foundation for an effective research design, provides an effective means of communication, and provides the core for the formal report of research. . . . The research proposal specifies what the investigator proposes to study and identifies the research question’’ (p. 48). The research proposal must include the following three sections: