Reply
Respond to at least two of your colleagues on two different days by offering additional ideas to overcome the barriers to strategies suggested by your colleagues and/or by offering additional ideas to facilitate dissemination.
1. The first step in the dissemination process is identifying stakeholders. Once stakeholders have been identified, you must build a rapport before presenting your information (Gllagher-Ford et al., 2011). You then need to plan how you are going to engage stakeholders and how you will deliver the information to them.
Dissemination strategies require clearly defined goals, sources, and audiences (Crable et al., 2023). Strategies that best suit me are a mixture of traditional and social media. For traditional, I would like to create a PowerPoint to present to stakeholders. For social media, I could create a social media platform to raise awareness on the topic being discussed. I chose PowerPoint because they are typically easy for everyone to follow, and it can be printed so stakeholders can take notes during the presentation if they would like. I chose a social media platform because social media allows information to be delivered rapidly to a large group of people (Bhatt et al., 2021).
Barriers that may be encountered while using PowerPoint to disseminate evidence-based practice are having a computer and a projector to show the information, and depending on where you are presenting, this may not be available. To overcome this barrier, I would go to the site before the presentation and scope out the resources that I may need to bring with me to the presentation. Despite being widely used, stakeholders may have differing opinions on using social media to spread information about their organization. I would talk with stakeholders beforehand and learn their opinions on the use of social media. It may be that they are okay with using social media, just that there are certain things they do not want to be shared about their organization. Talking with them beforehand would allow me to use social media and respect their opinions.
Bhatt, N. R., Czarniecki, S. W., Borgmann, H., van Oort, I. M.,Esperto, F., Pradere, B., van Gurp, M., Bloemberg, J., Darraugh, J., Roupret, M., Loeb, S., N’Dow, J., Ribal, M. J., & Giannarini, G. (2021). A Systematic Review of the Use of Social Media for Dissemination of Clinical Practice Guidelines. European Urology Focus, 7(5), 1195–1204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euf.2020.10.008
Erika L. Crable, Colleen M. Grogan, Jonathan Purtle, Scott C. Roesch, & Gregory A. Aarons. (2023). Tailoring dissemination strategies to increase evidence-informed policymaking for opioid use disorder treatment: study protocol. Implementation Science Communications, 4(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s43058-023-00396-5
Gallagher-Ford, L., Fineout-Overhold, E., Melnyk, B.M. & Stillwell, S.B. (2011). Evidence-based practice step-by-step: Implementing an evidence-based practice changeLinks to an external site.. American Journal of Nursing, 111(3), 54-60
2. To disseminate EBP, I would be most likely to use posters and social media. Posters are versatile and can help merge the strengths of oral presentations and published works (White et al., 2021, p. 257) Depending on where information is disseminated, presenters can verbally present information while having a visual aid for passersby. One barrier to poster use would be choosing what information to present with limited space. There are certain standards for research posters, but with an EBP project, the presenter may have control over fonts and colors to make it visually appealing. Posters also give presenters the option to interact with interested parties. They can add anecdotes and personality to the poster. While listeners may not remember all the information on the poster, they are much more likely to remember a funny story or a smiling face. My second choice of dissemination would be social media. There are several nuances to using social media and navigating and not being in control of how information is received and redistributed can be a barrier, but it is undoubtedly the most timely and cost-effective way to reach vast and diverse audiences. Posts/tweets, online newsletters, and blogs are all possibilities for distributing information. It may not be the best way to present lots of statistics and technical information, but it can be used to start discussions and help people engage with research (Lord et al., 2019). It also allows the public to be aware of new advancements. Social media can be used to divulge high points and digestible information and offer to link full studies for those interested. Social media is also immediate making it a timelier option. The method I would be least inclined to use is journal publications. Every journal has specific formats for the articles they publish. If my goal is to get published, my reporting and organization methods would need to reflect those standards. Manuscripts are permanent once published. They can be updated or debunked but, like social media, there will always be proof of it. The biggest barrier to manuscripts is the length of time it takes from the study to publication. As we see, healthcare moves fast, and best practices are constantly changing. It may take years to research, complete the study/project, and make all revisions necessary to get published. By then, the research may be obsolete. This is a universal problem but as a DNP, the focus is improving the practice of nursing. That is not possible to do with outdated information. While it is important that research reaches wide audiences, it is my philosophy to personally connect with nurses working directly with patients to improve nursing practice at the patient-facing level. It’s imperative that those nurses be included in quality improvement efforts to ensure that new protocols are feasible and create better workflows (Siedlecki, 2023).
References
Lord, S. E., Seavey, K. M., Oren, S. D., Budney, A. J., & Marsch, L. A. (2019). Digital presence of a research center as a research dissemination platform: Reach and resources. JMIR Mental Health, 6(4), e11686. https://doi.org/10.2196/11686
Siedlecki, S. L. (2023). Translational science. Clinical Nurse Specialist, 37(2), 54–57. https://doi.org/10.1097/nur.0000000000000728
White, K. M., Dudley-Brown, S., & Terhaar, M. F. (2021). Translation of evidence into nursing and healthcare (3rd ed., pp. 255–268). Springer Publishing Company.