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Purpose and procedure

The general purpose of Evidence-Based Nursing is to select from the health-related literature those articles reporting studies and reviews that warrant immediate attention by nurses attempting to keep pace with important advances in their profession. These articles are summarised in "value added" abstracts and commented on by nurses. The specific purposes of Evidence-Based Nursing are

• to identify, using predefined criteria, the best quantitative and qualitative original and review articles on the meaning, cause, course, assessment, prevention, treatment, or economics of health problems managed by nurses and on quality improvement
  
• to summarise this literature in the form of "structured abstracts" that describe the question, methods, results, and evidence-based conclusions of studies in a reproducible and accurate fashion
  
• to provide brief, highly expert comment on the context of each article, its methods, and the clinical applications that its findings warrant
  
• to disseminate the summaries in a timely fashion to nurses
  

The RCN . . . [Full text of this article]