Evidence-based Nursing Education: A Scoping Review

Nursing education are expected to prepare qualified professionals who are capable of identifying individual and collective health needs in the epidemiological transition societies and providing care using the best scientific evidence. Continuous creative teaching strategies after graduation can be the key to combine basic training and professional practice. This scoping review examines different evidence-based approaches nursing education. The review covers the period of 2007-2013. Searches were done initially by single keywords and using OR/AND, for combining words such as: evidence-based education, teaching methods, evidence-based nursing education, teaching strategies for identify publications from SID, IRANMEDEX, MAGIRAN, OVID, PROQUET, CINAHL, and PubMed databases. A total of 684 publications were found, from which, after excluding duplication and non-related papers, only nine publications were considered relevant to the subject and examined in-depth. Five teaching strategies of the evidence-based approaches were identified. They included: special settings and specific curriculum, collaborative approaches with clinical nurses, virtual teaching, interactive methods in small groups and project-based educational approach. Nursing educational strategies of evidence-based approaches vary with regards to content and implementation strategies. Different teaching techniques have been tried with different degree of success. It is the responsibility of the academic institutions and policy-makers to promote evidence-based teaching to reduce the gap between science production and clinical care.