Developing best practice in critical care nursing: knowledge, evidence and practice.

Because the current drive towards evidence-based critical care nursing practice is based firmly within the positivist paradigm, experimentally derived research tends to be regarded as 'high level' evidence, whereas other forms of evidence, for example qualitative research or personal knowing, carry less weight. This poses something of a problem for nursing, as the type of knowledge nurses use most in their practice is often at the so-called 'soft' end of science. Thus, the 'Catch 22' situation is that the evidence base for nursing practice is considered to be weak. Furthermore, it is argued in this paper that there are several forms of nursing knowledge, which critical care nurses employ, that are difficult to articulate. The way forward requires a pragmatic approach to evidence, in which all forms of knowledge are considered equal in abstract but are assigned value according to the context of a particular situation. It is proposed that this can be achieved by adopting an approach to nursing in which practice development is the driving force for change.