Writing a successful nursing pico research paper is no easy feat. It can be the most motivating or discouraging moment in your lifetime. Have you been wishing to get help on how to write a nursing pico research paper? This is a comprehensive and easy-to-understand guide on how to write your first successful nursing pico research paper that fulfills your wish. It focuses on the steps to help you in your writing process and achieve those top grades you have always wanted.
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Table of Contents
What is Pico?
Without a well-focused question, it can be difficult to identify the appropriate resources and search for relevant evidence. Practitioners of evident-based-practices like nurses use a specialized framework called PICO to form the question and facilitate the literature search.
PICO is a format for developing a clinical research question prior to starting one’s research. It is a mnemonic that describes the four elements of a sound clinical foreground question. PICO stands for :
P – Patient problem or population.
A population is a group of individuals of the same species living and interbreeding within a given area. However, this can be broken down to a certain group or a total number of people under study in retrospect to the matter in question.
In nursing, you think of factors like age, gender, socioeconomic status, occupation, and even more importantly what their problem is. People with similar conditions tend to have similarities. Hence, they are in the same population group. Here you are trying to understand your patient as aids in the treatment process.
I – Intervention.
Intervention means where you come in for the patient or where you interject them with the disease. This is when you ask yourself what you want to do with the patient.
C – comparison or control
Control is a stage of the PICO process where you compare the intervention to another treatment., a diagnostic test, or a drug. This allows you to be precise. Moreover, it enables you to eliminate possibilities and denies you the pleasure of being misled by misjudgment. However, on some occasions, there is no comparison.
O – outcome
This is the stage of the PICO process that gives results. It constitutes of rigorous study of statistical findings and this makes it highly effective and accurate.
The two points of view in dissecting the outcome are namely:
- Patient-oriented.
- Disease-oriented.
(T) – Time-frame.
The time-frame stage is basically aimed at data collection and at giving a time of outcome. In some cases, time can be used to tell the extent of the disease and its progression.
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Questions involved in the whole PICO process.
- Background questions – They are aimed at getting to understand more of the disease and patient. Thus, you are able to know what you are dealing with.
- Foreground questions – They are aimed at helping you in making clinical decisions.
Parts of foreground questions:
- Therapy.
- Prognosis.
- Diagnosis.
- Etiology or harm and
- Prevention.
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Steps to the perfect PICO search.
1. Formulate your PICO question.
You should write out your information need in form of a question. For example:
Does handwashing among healthcare workers reduce hospital-acquired infections?
This question has these PICO elements:
2. Identify the elements for each PICO question.
Population(P) – What individual or group are we interested in studying?
Intervention(I) – What is the action we are considering taking?
Comparison ( C ) – To what other actions are we comparing the considered action?
Outcome (O) – What do we anticipate as an outcome?
3. Plan your search strategy.
Search strategy – It is an organized structure of key terms. You use it to search a database.
A search strategy combines the key concepts of your search question in order to retrieve accurate results.
How to plan your search strategy:
- Determine which database(s) to search.
- Identify the major elements of your question.
- Translate natural language terms to subject descriptors.
4. Execute the search.
Before you execute the search, make sure the search mode is set to boolean or phrase. This option allows for ‘exact phrase’ searching. Each PICO element will be searched individually using the correlating search strategy. After a successful search, clear your screen to start a new search.
5. Refine your results.
Adding limiters allows you to refine your results. In addition to refining your results, it allows you to manage your time since it focuses results on the most relevant. This ensures that you do not waste time wading through content that may not be useful.
You can choose to limit your results using date and type:
- Published date – This option searches for articles within a specified date range.
- Evidence-based practice – This limits your article results to only those which are evidence-based.
If you use evidence-based practice, you can choose to limit using the following publication types:
- Case study.
- Clinical trial.
- Research.
- Randomized-control trial.
- Systematic review.
- Meta-analysis.
6. Review the literature.
7. Determine the level of evidence.
Points to keep in mind when forming a PICO question.
- Your patient is a member of a population at risk of a health problem. So you must consider age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or other demographic variables.
- A comparison is not always present in a PICO question.
- Outcomes should be measurable. This is because the evidence comes from studies with statistically significant findings.
- An outcome ideally measures the clinical well-being or quality of life.
One should remember that PICO elements change according to question types or domain. That is why it is important to think about what type of question you are asking when forming your question.
This background teaches you all basics of PICO nursing papers, that is, from breaking it down into parts to doing your background, foreground evaluation, and matching them into the PICO strategy. Therefore, you are ready to formulate a PICO question. You are now ready to take on any nursing PICO question and get top grades in your exams.
