Harris College collaborating with clinical partners to improve the quality of care for patients

Fort Worth, TX

11/3/2008

The Harris College of Nursing and Health Sciences is continuing to collaborate this year with clinical partners in the Metroplex to improve the quality of care provided to patients.

The Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) Fellowship will bring together 34 staff nurses from various hospitals across the Dallas-Fort Worth area to learn techniques to infuse evidence-based practice into their own settings.

Currently, the institutions sending EBP Fellows are acute-care hospitals, in which patients are treated for a short, but severe, illnesses.

During the Fellowship, each EBP Fellow will select a project designed to solve a clinical problem or question in his or her own institution. It is hoped that this will further the work of the TCU Center for Evidence-Based Practice and Research to facilitate the infusion of evidence-based practice and research into the practice setting.

The collaborative was developed out of the TCU Center for Evidence-Based Practice and Research in 2007.

Through a grant from TCU’s Vision in Action program, the center was founded on the belief that caring for clients and their families using generally accepted practices and interventions is no longer sufficient in health care.

Health care practitioners must now provide "best practices" or care that is evidence based, meaning grounded in research and known to promote better cost and quality outcomes.

The entrepreneurial center is a unique approach to marketing faculty expertise in research and evidence-based practice to health care agencies.

Susan Weeks, director of the center, believes that this is an excellent example of TCU partnering with our clinical partners to improve the quality of care that is provided. In turn, our students will be able to experience clinical learning environments with enhanced EBP skills.