Inclusion in National Repository Helps Move ONS Guidelines™ Evidence to Practice

February 15, 2021 by Pamela K. Ginex, EdD, RN, OCN® Senior Manager, Evidence Based Practice and Inquiry

When they launched in 2020, oncology nurses recognized the first five ONS Guidelines™ for cancer treatment-related symptoms and adverse events (https://www.ons.org/ons-guidelines) as the evidence-based standard for patient care. Now, the ECRI Guidelines Trust (https://guidelines.ecri.org/), a national evaluation organization, has given them that distinction as well, including all of ONS’s current guidelines in its repository.

ONS Guidelines give nurses and other healthcare professionals the best available evidence to guide patient care decisions. Inclusion in the ECRI Guidelines Trust, a publicly available repository of evidence-based guidelines in health care, means that the ONS Guidelines can reach an even wider group of practitioners to help them improve care and patient outcomes.

ONS Guidelines Score High in TRUST

The Trust provides healthcare providers with easy access to guidelines to advance safe and effective patient care. It’s a unique arrangement, where an unbiased team of guidelines experts summarizes and scores the guidelines for the repository. This scoring is important because not all guidelines are created equal and may follow different methodology. ECRI evaluates the guidelines according to its TRUST (Transparency and Rigor Using Standards of Trustworthiness) scorecard, which measures the extent to which a guideline adheres to the National Academy of Medicine Standards for Trustworthy Guidelines.

The TRUST scorecard includes seven criteria in five categories:

ONS guidelines scored highly in each category.

How to Implement Guidelines in Practice

Guidelines are only able to improve care once nurses have implemented them in practice. Changing practice is not always easy, but nurses are leading experts in using evidence-based practice and quality improvement techniques to advance the adoption and integration of interventions into our practice settings.

Nurses have worked to implement a variety of evidence-based guidelines into clinical care and reported some of their strategies:

As leading voices in developing strategies and models that help guide the successful implementation of practice change, nurses can share their best practices with peers by:

By working collaboratively, oncology nurses can use the best available evidence to improve outcomes for our patients.


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