[IMPACT OF ADVANCED NURSING PRACTICE ON STAFF DEVELOPMENT AND EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE]

At international level, there is abundant evidence of the positive impact that the Advanced Practice Nurse (APN) has on patients, health care organizations and nursing professionals. At national level, such evidence is incipient and should be developed in order to justify investments in the introduction of APN roles. The present study provides evidence on the impact of the APN in the professional development of nurses in one outpatient clinic of a hospital in Northern Spain.

The advanced practice nursing student (APNS) developed a change project aimed at improving knowledge of evidence based practice (EBP) among nurses in the cited outpatient clinic. To that end, the APNS followed the steps of the PEPPA (participatory, evidence-based, patient-focused process, for guiding the development, implementation, and evaluation of advanced practice nursing) framework and conducted unstructured observations, literature reviews, personal interviews and group discussions with 8 patients, 2 nurses and 4 cardiologists. The evaluation of the change project included personal interviews with nurses in the outpatient clinic before and after the intervention.

Nurses notably increased their knowledge on formulating clinical questions, developing and executing bibliographic searches, synthesizing and criticizing evidence, and applying and evaluating research results.

The results suggest that the positive impact of the integration of APNs into the Spanish clinical setting is not restricted to just patients and the hospital setting, but extends to the professional development of nurses and the outpatient clinic setting.