Journal club in a critical care unit: an innovative design triggering learning through reading and dialogue

Journal club has been used for decades to incorporate reading clinical and research articles into professional practice of numerous health care providers to disseminate knowledge and to bridge the gap between research and clinical practice. In this article, the authors describe how such activity was implemented by and for the nursing team of an intensive care unit. This journal club was designed to trigger dialogue among the nurses related to cardiac surgery topics, while providing an organizational support for them aimed to facilitate the incorporation of reading in their professional habits. More specifically, the design of this journal club was intended to create an opportunity for these nurses to keep their practice updated, to review physiological or pathological processes related to the cardiac surgery population, and to explore if how and why the results described in those research reports should be implemented in their own intensive care unit. The authors describe the phases of this project: the co-development of the journal club, the implementation of the activity and its results. The authors detail how this journal club format incorporated additional teaching aids during each session and used narrative pedagogy as a conceptual framework.