Now that you’ve found your evidence, summarized the material, and completed your TOE, it’s time to do your critical literature review and nursing implications sections. Use the data from your TOE to help you.
Submit to the Assignments section the following:
- The names of all group members.
- Restate your PICO question (in question format only).
- Complete the Literature Review section
- Include 5-10 paragraphs demonstrating that you have fully read and analyzed all of the evidence. You will likely need to use subheadings to organize your review. Consider questions such as:
- What were the common themes throughout the articles?
- Were the articles studying the same/different variables?
- Were the findings the same/different?
- How do the main objectives/purposes of the researchers affect how the studies were designed/carried out?
- Discuss the levels of evidence and how that affects the credibility of the findings.
- How did the design of the studies affect the outcomes?
- Discuss reliability and validity of findings. (Focus heavily on this part. It doesn’t matter what the findings say if they aren’t reliable/valid, so fully evaluate them based on the criteria from the textbook. Discuss the different types of reliability/validity. Be very specific.)
- Is the evidence contradictory? If so, why might this be so? (i.e. One study is more reliable than the other.)
- Complete the Implications for Nursing Practice section
- Include 1-2 paragraphs of implications for nursing practice.
- Consider such questions as:
- How can/should nursing practice change based on these findings?
- How should nurses respond to these findings?
- Can current nursing practices be improved with these findings?
- Etc.
- Note: This is the crux of your entire paper, so make sure to focus on it. Nursing research is only important if you can use it to improve nursing practice. This section doesn’t have to be long, but make it count.