Background

Problems connected with dissem-ination and utilisation of obtained scientific knowledge within nur-sing and allied health fields have been an issue for many years. During the past decade the dis-cussion has been focusing on what has been labelled as evi-dence-based practice or, in a nursing context, evidence-based nursing (EBN). EBN is consi-dered to be a way to deliver nur-sing care of the highest quality to the lowest cost possible. By uti-lising the best knowledge avail-able nursing care is supposed to be efficient and serve best the interests of the patients. Evidence-based practice seems easy to accept in theory, but hard to accomplish in practice. A num-ber of studies show that nurses only partially use scientific evi-dences. Only one out of 87 nurses knew the optimal time for the thermometer to be in the mouth in spite of results being published in a number of journals (1). Almost the same results were found about the influence of cold drinks on mouth temperature measurement (2). Brett (3) asked 279 nurses about their familiarity to 14 different evidence-based procedures on a seven-step scale from «never heard about » to «uses always». The most well known procedures were those for urine catheters (95 % answered «heard about » and 79 % – «use always») while the latest findings about pain assessment were less known (34 % «heard about » and 9 % «use always»). In a Swedish study only 13 % of the nurses indicated that they ever read sci-entific journals (4). However, it is not only nurses being slow in applying known results, the same counts for physicians and evidence based medicine (EBM). After a litera-ture review, Greenhalgh (5) con-cludes that in the early 1980s in Great Britain only 15 % of all medical procedures were evi-dence-based. In the middle of the 1990s the main prescription after a consultation was evidence-based in 81–82 % of the cases studied in internal medicine and family practice but only in 62% of the cases in psychiatry. A list of therapeutic measures was pre-sented to British and Australian physiotherapists (PT) with ten years of experience. They were asked to indicate the knowledge base for each measure. The most common base was «learned at school » or «former experience». Among British PTs 27.7 % of the measures was based on contem-porary research. The figures fo