If an institutional policy does not reflect the standards and recommendations of INS or ONS, does anyone have ideas as to how, in general, the state boards of nursing or the legal community views this potential conflict?
The more I read about evidence based practice it seems to be a blending of local, institutional, personal and study data melding. This can be quite confusing. Do state boards of nursing and the legal community place standards and recommendations above individual policies?
Any suggestions as to how to answer these tough questions?
Any published document, be it standards, guidelines, or textbooks, will always be behind the other published research in journals. So you would use the most recent information to base your policies and procedures on. Writing standards and textbooks requires at least a couple of years. So the literature search in the beginning may be outdated even before the publication is released. So it is a combination of all documents. In a court of law, all documents in publication at the time of the event is what is used. So you would rely upon the standards, textbooks, guidelines, other publications that were out at the time of the event, but nothing more recent than the date of the event. If your policies and procedures are in conflict with the published standards and you do not have additional research to support your P&P, then the experts in a legal case would have lots of issues with that. RE state boards, are you in a state that has a practice group making decisions about scope of practice issues? Then you will need to seek their approval using their specific processes if you are trying to do a task that is an expansion of your practice and not previously addressed by the state BON. If your state uses a scope of practice decision tree, locate this document and go by those instructions. Lynn
Lynn Hadaway, M.Ed., RN, NPD-BC, CRNI
Lynn Hadaway Associates, Inc.
PO Box 10
Milner, GA 30257
Website http://www.hadawayassociates.com
Office Phone 770-358-7861