The Joanna Briggs Institute clinical fellowship program: a gateway opportunity for evidence-based quality improvement and organizational culture change.

Abstract

Practising health professionals trained and prepared for best practice lead the provision of high quality, evidencebased healthcare (EBHC), as many researchers have consistently demonstrated. Nurses in particular have a high level of knowledge and acceptance of EBHC, high uptake of EBHC principals in undergraduate and postgraduate nursing programs, and increasing integration of evidence in nurse-led quality improvement initiatives. There havebeenmany benefits to the uptake of EBHC, not just in terms of practice improvement, but also in understanding individual and organizational barriers and facilitators and indeed the process of change itself. However, nurses are not always professionally enabled to contribute to EBHC initiatives. While EBHC has supported nurses to make substantive contributions to professional nursing knowledge and practice, there are still gaps. A lack of autonomy in the strategic and cultural domains of healthcare organization and delivery is problematic.Withoutmechanisms to address these systemic, organizational issues, the promise and potential contribution of nursing will not be fully realized. The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) was established as an international research institute in 1996 with a vision for a world in which the best available evidence is used to inform policy and practice to improve health in communities globally. While many associate JBI with systematic reviews of the best available evidence, that is only one element of their work. JBI is also involved with knowledge transfer and knowledge implementation as the JBI Model (Fig. 1) illustrates. The JBI Evidence-Based Clinical Fellowship Program (EBCFP) focuses on implementation and was designed for busy healthcare practitioners, managers, and administrators, who have an interest in implementing best practice, but may not have familiarity with the suite of skills needed to lead and sustain practice change. The program is delivered over 6 months; participants attend an intensive 1-week workshop that provides foundational knowledge on change management,