Evidence for Nursing: Finding the Evidence

EVIDENCE FOR NURSING
Assessment Item 1: Finding the evidence Weight: 15% of overall mark for
the subject
Task: Using clinical case scenarios, students will be expected to develop a question
to address the area of clinical uncertainty and demonstrate their ability to use the
PICO framework and document a systematic literature search.
Instructions
This assignment builds on your learning during Week 1, Week 2, and Week 3. The
learning activities in these tutorials have been designed to help you with formulating
PICO questions and developing search strategies, which is the focus of Assessment 1.
The face to face library session in Week 1 tutorial along with additional library drop in
sessions and online library modules provide bonus assistance in relation to this
assessment.
In this assignment, we will look at the evidence of your ability to formulate structured
and searchable questions and build a systematic literature search.
1. Choose one of the provided clinical case scenarios (see page 2).
2. Using the information from the case scenario, and your skills from Week 1,
Week 2, Week 3 answer the questions in the PICO worksheet to plan for your
systematic database search.
3. Using the information from your PICO Worksheet, record your Search Strategy in
the given search strategy table (please do this in Microsoft Word).
4. Enter your search terms into Embase (Elsevier Platform) and complete a search.
5. Take a screenshot of final search and paste it into the end of this document (see
the example print screen on the last page).
Assessment Item 1: Finding the evidence Page 1

Choose one of the following case scenarios to guide your work in
Assessment one
Scenario 1: Compression stockings
You are working on a hospital ward where you encounter stroke patients. You notice
that some doctors order compression stockings for prevention of deep venous
thrombosis while others not. You are concerned about the diversity of practice and
decide to search the literature to find any evidence supporting the usage of stockings
for stroke patients.
Scenario 2: Postoperative pulmonary complications
You are a newly graduated registered nurse working in a cardiac surgery ward. You
attend a conference and hear that some of your peers at another hospital are
providing preoperative breathing exercises to patients who will be undergoing cardiac
surgery in order to reduce their risk of pulmonary complications postoperatively. You
are not aware of any research that has investigated the beneficiary effects of
preoperative interventions such as muscle training and breathing exercises and would
like to search for evidence to decide whether this is something you should use at your
hospital.
Scenario 2: Managing Chronic Heart Failure
Assessment Item 1: Finding the evidence Page 2