Factors Influencing Nurses' Involvements and Utilizations of Research Findings Among Nurses in a Teaching Hospital, South West, Nigeria

Abstract

Background: Nursing is a profession that is concern with ensuring high quality of patient care. To providing quality care, participation in research and research utilization is very necessary. Objective: This study was designed to study factors influencing nurses’ involvement in research and utilization of research findings among nurses of a Teaching Hospital, South west, Nigeria. Method: A descriptive design was used. Convenient sample technique was used to select 198 Nurses and Self-developed questionnaire with reliability index of 0.875 was used for data collection. Data collected were analyzed using SPSS package. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to test the hypotheses and results were presented in tables. Result: The outcome of the study showed that 153(77.3) have never carried out any research while70 (35.4%) have never make use of research findings. Factors such as time, organizational policy, mentorship, funds and knowledge of research are some of the major factors influencing the involvement of nurses in research while awareness of research findings, time to read research findings, support from colleague, unpublished research influenced utilization of research findings. There was a significant relationship between: support from colleagues and nurses’ utilization of research findings (p=0.001); between unpublished research and nurses’ utilization of research findings( p-value= 0.000); between time to implement new ideas and the utilization of research findings by nurses (p=0.005); between organizational support and nurses’ utilization of research findings (p= 0.001); between the presence of research committee and nurses’ utilization of research findings (p= 0.000). Conclusion; numerous factors highlighted above are noted to influence nurse’s participation and utilization of research findings; hence, a multidimensional approach should be applied in solving the problem.