Can nursing students practice what is preached? Factors impacting graduating nurses' abilities and achievement to apply evidence based practices

Background: In order to meet national Australian nursing registration requisites, nurses need to meet competency requirements for evidence-based practices (EBPs). Aims: A hypothetical model was formulated to explore factors that influenced Australian nursing students’ ability and achievement to understand and employ EBPs related to health care provision. Methods: A nonexperimental, descriptive survey method was used to identify self-reported EBP efficacy estimates of 375 completing undergraduate nursing students. Factors influencing participants’ self-rated EBP abilities were validated by Rasch analysis and then modeled using the partial least squares analysis (PLS Path) program. Results: Graduating nursing students’ ability to understand and apply EBPs for clinical improvement can be directly and indirectly predicted by eight variables including their understanding in the analysis, critique and synthesis of clinically based nursing research, their ability to communicate research to others and whether they had actually witnessed other staff delivering EBP. Linking Evidence to Action: Forty-one percent of the variance in the nursing students’ self-rated EBP efficacy scores is able to be accounted for by this model. Previous exposure to EBP studies facilitates participants’ confidence with EBP, particularly with concurrent clinical EBP experiences.