Linking Hospitals to Communities Through Evidence-Based Practice

Evidence-based practice (EBP) and innovation are critical to quality and improved outcomes in the acute care setting and are often driven by bedside caregiver and clinical nurse specialist collaboration. Several EBP models and frameworks exist to guide these efforts. Although existing models do not preclude external evidence and community-based stakeholders, they largely do not explicitly connect the hospital-based effort to the community either. In our experience in facilitating EBP projects within an acute care hospital in the upper Midwest, we observed multiple situations in which nurse-led EBP projects intersected with the surrounding community in multiple phases of the project. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate an explicit connection between hospital-placed EBP processes and community/population health. To illustrate this assertion, 3 exemplars of nurse-driven, hospital-placed innovation are presented. Implications for practice and research are discussed.