An appraisal of a piece of research-based evidence relevant to Essay

An appraisal of a piece of research-based evidence relevant to healthcare practice - Essay Example The following appraisal evaluates a clinical research study and its potential applications to nursing practice. The main aims of this research study were to evaluate student nurses’ perceptions of hand hygiene practice compliance in order to explore ways of effectively incorporating best practice standards of hand hygiene compliance into nursing school curricula and training programmes. The impetus for this study was the documentation of increased incidence of health-care associated infections (HCAIs) and data that suggest that there are generally poor compliance rates for hand hygiene among healthcare workers (Creedon 2005). The rationale for the increased attention to hygiene compliance is that greater attention to hand hygiene practices among nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers may produce a decrease in the overall incidence of HCAIs among patients (Boyce & Pittet 2002). This is a very serious problem as noscomial infections are associated with higher mortality rates in critically ill patients, increased hospital stays and excessive antibiotic usage, all of which represent unwanted complications in patient care. There are a number of excellent search engines that would be relevant to this type of search. These include the Cochrane Library Online, which is a website containing journal articles and research findings designed to meet the needs of nursing professionals. Another excellent website is the Centers for Disease Control website (CDC), a USA based database that contains the results of the latest research on infectious disease, and evidence-based practice research findings. Pubmed/medline is an online database that can be used in a search by topic mode to obtain the latest journal research articles on this subject. The rationale for this research study involving nursing students’ perceptions of hand hygiene compliance was the