Creating a spirit of enquiry (enhancing research)

The provision of evidence‐based clinical care is now an essential aspect of modern healthcare (Richardson-Tench, Nicholson, Taylor, & Kermode, 2018). The idea of evidence‐based practice (EBP) feels intuitively sound: both professional intuition and clinical experience suggest that the client or patient is more likely to receive good‐quality care if that care is based on sound evidence. However, the implementation of EBP remains a challenge with healthcare and policy decisions still being based on historical and unsystematic forms of clinical practice (Buckwalter et al., 2017). This chapter attempts to address this issue by discussing what constitutes EBP and how nurses and other health professionals can develop a spirit of enquiry. It also considers how clinical leaders can use evidence to support change and strengthen their practice by developing a nexus between research, clinical evidence, practice, and education to create a workplace that promotes critical thinking and new knowledge.