Barriers to and Facilitators of Research Utilization among Iranian Nurses: a Literature Review

Research utilization (RU), is an important strategy to promote the quality of patient care. The aim of this study was to present a comprehensive literature review describing barriers and facilitators of RU among Iranian nurses.

Literature review was undertaken using the international databases including Pub Med/Medline, Scopus, Science Direct, and Google Scholar. Also, Persian electronic databases such as Magiran, SID and Iran Medex were searched up to May 2014. The search was limited to articles in the English and Persian languages that evaluate the barriers or facilitators of RU among Iranian nurses.

A total of 11 articles were in the final dataset. The most important barriers to RU among Iranian nurses were related to the organization factors such as inadequate facilities; insufficient time on the job, lack of authority, physician cooperation, and administrative support. The most frequent facilitators of RU were education in enhancing nurses knowledge and skills in research evaluation, support from knowledgeable nursing colleagues and nursing faculty in the clinical setting, access to an expert committee for clinical appraisal, improving skills in English language and searching for articles, sufficient economic resources to carry out research, and having access to more facilities such as internet.

Iranian nurses encounter with the same difficulties as to other countries regarding RU; while setting related barriers were the predominant obstacles to RU among them. Therefore, health managers are expected to plan appropriate strategies to smooth the progress of RU by nurses in their practice.