Brief reports for disseminating systematic reviews to nurses.

Much has been written about the importance of using research findings to guide nursing practice. How to best disseminate those findings to nurses remains a challenge. In many clinical settings, nurses interested in research utilization and evidence-based practice retrieve, review, and integrate knowledge from research reports to guide decisions about best practices. Major barriers to this approach, however, are staff nurses' lack of time, expertise, and resources for this process. One approach to overcoming these barriers is to disseminate the results of systematic research reviews directly to nurses in the form of brief reports, written in an easy-to-understand style, and sent via e-mail. This article describes the development of brief reports as a strategy for disseminating the results of systematic reviews to staff nurses. To demonstrate the use of brief reports for this purpose, we chose a systematic review published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.