After you have defined your PICOT question and identified your patient care issue, you can begin and the first part of your quality improvement (QI) project. In order to do this, you will need to do a literature search to find evidence for your topic. Once you have found the evidence in the literature, construct a table of evidence from studies relevant to your topic that you have found from your literature search. In general, you should limit your literature search to articles and major reviews which have been published during the last five years. There should be a minimum of six articles reviewed and you can include systematic reviews. The columns in the table should include the following:
1. Title, journal in which the study was published, year it was published
2. Type of study (refer to the table on page 62 of this article)
3. The research question or hypothesis
4. The study methodology
5. The level of the evidence (refer to)
6. Description of the subjects and sample size
7. Major findings from the study
Additional resources can be found at the following website. (Health Sciences Library, 2012 Evidence-Based Practice Tools) http://libguides.hsl.washington.edu/ebptools.
Please refer to the following reading in week 1 Presentation, AACN 2012 Levels of Evidence:
Peterson, M. H., Barnason, S., Donnelly, B., Hill, K., Miley, H., Riggs, L., & Whiteman, K. (2014). Choosing the Best Evidence to Guide Clinical Practice: Application of AACN Levels of Evidence. Critical Care Nurse, 34(2), 58-68
Here is an example of how to construct a table of evidence:
Authors Names, Source, and Year Type of Study Research Question/Hypothesis Methodology/
Study Design Level of Evidence Description of Subjects and Sample Size Major Findings
Jones and Smith, Nursing Research 2012 Descriptive study about nurses in critical care units who smoke. Do nurses in critical care smoke more than nurses in medical surgical unit? Mailed survey of hospital employees at a large university setting 150 nurses
in critical care,150 nurses in med/surg,
80% female between ages of 25-45 There was no significant difference in smoking based on the unit worked.
