Nurses should provide education and repeated teaching to improve patient safety, adherence to the medication, and self-monitoring for adverse effects.

Much has been written about the importance of using research findings to guide nursing practice. How to best disseminate those findings to nurses remains a challenge. In many clinical settings, nurses interested in research utilization and evidence-based practice retrieve, review, and integrate knowledge from research reports to guide decisions about best practices. Major barriers to this approach, however, are staff nurses' lack of time, expertise, and resources for this process. One approach to overcoming these barriers is to disseminate the results of systematic research reviews directly to nurses in the form of brief reports, written in an easy-to-understand style, and sent via e-mail. This article describes the development of brief reports as a strategy for disseminating the results of systematic reviews to staff nurses. To demonstrate the use of brief reports for this purpose, we chose a systematic review published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.

Research is of little value to clinical practice if the findings are not appropriately integrated into that practice. While publishing the results of research is essential for translating findings into practice, Marilyn Oermann and colleagues suggest that work is not done until the findings are disseminated for use by clinicians and others who need the research results to guide their practice

Meta-analytic findings can be useful to nurses seeking research results to guide practice, but graphics used by meta-analysts take time to master. Simpler displays can be created by staff development educators if they understand commonly used meta-analytic displays. For instance, simplified versions of 'forest plots', a common metaphoric display can be created to introduce staff nurses to meta-analytic findings published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and similar databases.

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