Promoting evidence‐based practice: the roles and activities of professional nurses’ associations

Abstract

Professional nurses' association roles in the promotion of evidence-based practice need to be viewed in relation to the tasks to be accomplished, especially those of selecting and distributing evidence. Although many organizations expressed motivation, professional nurses' associations have a long way to go in the promotion of evidence-based practice among their members.

Priority setting and policy advocacy by nursing associations: A scoping review and implications using a socio-ecological whole systems lens

“…Organizations were more likely to be active and succeed if advocacy functions were written into organizational policies, strategic plans, and goals [26,56,61]. While few references were made, the nursing literature confirmed that organization policy might serve to support and enhance policy advocacy initiatives [81].…”

“…Within these membership configurations, motives for joining organizations, and the backgrounds, perspectives, interests, skills, and expertise of members were diverse. Organizations with more homogeneous membership facilitated an organization's ability to speak with one voice [26,64,81]. However, diversity enhanced access to highlevel policy-makers and added legitimacy to their voice [26].…”

“…On the other hand, heterogeneity among members contributed to tensions, exacerbated internal conflicts, lowered levels of participation, and created delays in the fruition of policies. Divisiveness that accompanied diversity was particularly noted in the nursing literature [67,[80][81][82][84][85][86][87][88][89].…”

“…Collaborations provided access to policies outside organizations' jurisdiction authority and enhanced advocacy capacity [26,48,56,59,62]. However, the nursing literature particularly described how organizations with different mandates, purposes, histories, organizational structures, cultures, and membership responsibilities experienced competition, conflict, diminished ability to speak as a collective voice, and policy inertia [37,39,47,81,84,86,88,89,94,98,99]. Challenges to collaborations were partly attributed to a rise in specialty nursing organizations that ignored issues outside their specialties.…”

“…Confidence in organizations' competence, expected performance, or anticipated contributions to solve a problem facilitated organizations' participation in policy initiatives and increased their political power [30,42,64,66,81,94]. The non-nursing literature suggested that organizations perceived to be credible by external parties were more likely to use direct advocacy tactics (e.g., direct negotiation), while indirect advocacy tactics (e.g., influence public opinion) were used when organizations had been ineffective in getting a response from government or were excluded from decision tables [71].…”