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Grants and Funded Projects
Evidence-Based Practice: Acute Pain Management in the Elderly
Overview
This 3-year experimental study is testing an interdisciplinary, multifaceted intervention for promoting use of research findings in practice. This intervention will be used to promote adoption of an evidence-based guideline for the management of acute pain in the elderly. The study focuses on the management of pain in older adults with hip fractures, a population that is likely to have acute pain. Since pain management is an interdisciplinary endeavor, the project brings together experts from the University of Iowa Colleges of Nursing, Pharmacy, Medicine, and Public Health and from the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.
Partnerships have been established with 12 mid-western hospitals, which have been randomized into either an experimental or a control group. Both groups will be given a newly developed evidence-based guideline on "Acute Pain Management in the Elderly".
Hospitals in the experimental group will be exposed to a multifaceted, interdisciplinary intervention guided by Dr. Everett Rogers' (1995) model on diffusion of innovation. Hospitals in the control and experimental groups will be compared to determine the effect of the intervention on the rate and extent of guideline adoption and on barriers to use of the guideline. The study will also examine the cost-effectiveness of the intervention.
It is anticipated that hospitals in the experimental group will adopt the guideline more quickly and extensively than do hospitals in the control group. Guideline adoption, in turn, would be expected to lead to improvements in the care delivered to older adults with hip fractures. Ultimately, this study extends the science of translational research.
Reference
Rogers, E. (1995). Diffusion of innovations. New York: The Free Press.
