Editorial

The Evidence of Change

Alison Brettle

Editor-in-Chief

School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work

University of Salford, United Kingdom

Email: A.Brettle@salford.ac.uk

2014 Brettle. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 2.5 Canada (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the same or similar license to this one.

Welcome to the March 9(1) issue of EBLIP; our first issue for 2014. Spring is traditionally the time of year associated with change and the EBLIP journal has been no exception. We would like to welcome on board a number of new members to our editorial team and contributors to the journal. First of all we would like to welcome Lisl Zach, our new Associate Editor (Articles). Lisl is from Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA, a library and information science educator with a range of research interests, who will work alongside Lorie Kloda. Finally we are welcoming on board a number of new Evidence Summary writers; there are too many to mention individually but we are pleased that they will be making an excellent contribution to the journal. We also have to say some goodbyes. First of all to Pam Morgan, our indexer who has been with us since the inception of the journal. I would like to thank Pam for all the work she has undertaken over the last eight years in making EBLIP and its contents visible to the wider audience. Secondly Derek Rodriguez, who was with us for a short time as Associate Editor (Articles), had to re-evaluate his position at the journal due to increasing demands in his day job. Thanks go to Derek for his contribution in 2013.

Change and evaluation are both consistent with EBLIP itself, as both are associated with the latter stages of the EBLIP process (Apply findings to change practice and Assess to evaluate the impact of that change). The idea of translating or implementing evidence into practice is something that can be seen as a challenge or quite scary. So I thought it may be useful to share some words of wisdom from evidence based health care writers which I think are equally applicable in libraries. In relation to implementing evidence into practice “even with the best laid plans, if something can go wrong, it will” (Hagedorn et al., 2006, S21) and “there’s no magic bullet for translating what is known from research into practice” (Titler, 2008, p. 12). Fortunately the same writers offer some solutions “it is vital to be able to assess barriers to implementation quickly and correct for them” (Hagedorn et al., 2006) and “to move evidence based interventions into practice, several strategies may be needed as what works in one context may not in another” (Titler, 2008). I prefer to sum these solutions up with my own words of wisdom for implementing evidence into practice “Know your enemy” and “If at first you don’t succeed, then try and try again”. So with these words of wisdom in mind, I challenge you to implement some evidence into your practice and evaluate the results.

References

Hagedord, H., Hogan, M., Smith, J.L., Bowman, C., Curran, G.M., Espadas, B., Kimmel, B., Kochevar, L., Legro, M.W., Sales, A.E. (2006). Lessons learned about implementing research evidence into clinical practice: Experiences from VA QUERI. J Gen Intern Med; 21(Suppl. 2): S21-24. doi:10.1111/j.1525-1497.2006.00358.x

Titler, M.G., (2008). The evidence for evidence-based practice implementation. In: R.G. Hughes (Ed.)., Patient safety and quality: An evidence-based handbook for nurses. (Chapter 7). Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.