How does IGMH ensure best practice in nursing?

Objectives: With the recent developments in the health sector which resulted in restructuring and re-orientation of public hospitals to be more health promoting, this study sought to describe the policies and procedures in place to ensure evidence based nursing care in the largest public hospital in the Maldives. It also aimed to identify barriers if any for evidence based nursing practice in the studied institution.

Methods: A cross-sectional design with face to face interviews with the managerial nursing staff was used to collect information on the procedures in place to ensure evidence-based practice, along with a survey of 100 nurses (recruited through snowball sampling) to assess their knowledge, attitude, and practices of evidence-based practice. Other publicly available documents such as policy documents and procedure guidelines were also used to see how they reflect current research findings and evidence-based practice.

Results: At three stages the hospital has policies and procedures in place to ensure healthy public policy is observed in the provision of nursing care. These are before recruitment, during induction, and in service. However, these policies or procedures are not always followed due to different reasons and the hospital does not have a strategy or means of evaluating the outcome or performance.

Conclusions: The study found that having specific policies or protocols in place does not necessarily ensure the implementation of them. There needs to be a way of measuring the outcomes and providing feedback to the practitioners so that the hospital’s mission of promoting the health of the Maldivian population on the basis of equity and equitable outcomes can be achieved. Such a program is also necessary to produce evidence specific to the population.