Health & Social Care In The Community Docx.

Running head: EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE 1
Evidence-Based Practice
Name
Institution

EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE 2
A Justification of the Application of EBP
Evidence-based is important in clinical decision-making because it ensures that patients can get
access to the most effective care thus improving patient outcomes. Patients must receive the most
effective and sophisticated care based on the best available evidence. According to Majid et al.
(2011), nurses can apply critical appraisal of scientifically proven evidence to ensure that quality
healthcare is delivered to a specific population by the use of the evidence-based practice. An
evidence-based practice relies on a competent clinical reasoning cycle to combine several pieces
of information from four primary sources that include clinical expertise, information from the
context of practice, best accessible research evidence, and the values and circumstances of a
patient. The initial step of evidence-based practice is to convert the needed information into an
answerable clinical question. The second step is finding the best and most suitable evidence to
answer the question (Drisko & Grady, 2019). This is then followed by critically appraising the
evidence to prove that it is applicable and valid. The fourth and final step is the integration of the
retrieved evidence into clinical reasoning.
Evidence-based practice can be used to identify and discuss the effect of family caregivers’
health literacy on functional health status in elderly people. According to Yuen et al. (2016),
family caregivers play a crucial role in the care and support of elderly patients with chronic
conditions, physical impairments, or cognitive impairments. Low levels of health literacy among
caregivers can massively affect the adequate provision of care thus impacting on health
outcomes of patients. It is important to improve the health literacy of family caregivers because
poor health literacy leads to poor health outcomes, ineffective disease self-management, an
increase in the use of healthcare services, a reduction in the psychological well-being of both the

EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE 3
patient and the caregiver, and an increased mortality rate among the elderly patients (Bostock &
Steptoe, 2012).
Healthcare practitioners must use the best piece of evidence to inform clinical reasoning and
decision-making. This is because evidence-based practice ensures that nurses can access
adequate scientific research to make informed decisions in clinical practice. Through evidence-
based practice, healthcare can apply the most recent and up to date scientific research in clinical
practice to improve health outcomes and reduce the demand for healthcare resources.
The Breakdown of the Answerable Question
To break down the answerable question, a PICO format is used to identify valid search terms. It
is important to note that the PICO format helps in identifying and describing all the necessary
elements required in a researchable clinical question. The PICO format helps in defining an
answerable question by framing, assessing, locating, and repeating the question until a valid
answer is achieved. Most studies define P to stand for population, the letter I to stand for an
intervention, C to stand for a comparison for the intervention and O to stand for the outcome of
the intervention. In the provided answerable question (what is the effect of family caregivers’
health literacy on functional health status in elderly people?); P will be used to describe the
patients as the population of the study. The most appropriate intervention is health literacy
among caregivers and it is represented with the letter I. The lack of health literacy is the
comparative option and is represented by the letter C. Finally, the outcome will be the changes in
health outcomes of the patient and is represented by the letter O. Some other words that could be
used to describe each letter of the PICO format are used in the table below and they were also
used in the search strategy protocol.