Promoting clinical inquiry and evidence-based practice: the sacred cow contest strategy.

Achieving and sustaining evidence-based practice (EBP) in an organization's practice culture can be challenging for administrators and educators. Brown's Sacred Cow Contest provides a creative strategy to promote clinical inquiry and generate interest in EBP. The author discusses how replication of the strategy in a large healthcare system successfully inspired nurses to question traditional nursing practices, yielding 118 contest entries. Teams of nurses are currently applying EBP process steps to confirm or change the reported practices.