Is there a difference between “common practice” and “best practice”?

When you first went to work for your current organization, experienced colleagues may have shared with you details about processes and procedures. Perhaps you even attended an orientation session to brief you on these matters. As a “rookie,” you likely kept the nature of your questions to those with answers that would best help you perform your new role.

Over time and with experience, perhaps you recognized aspects of these processes and procedures that you wanted to question further. This is the realm of clinical inquiry.

Clinical inquiry is the practice of asking questions about clinical practice. To continuously improve patient care, all nurses should consistently use clinical inquiry to question why they are doing something the way they are doing it. Do they know why it is done this way, or is it just because we have always done it this way? Is it a common practice or a best practice?

In this Assignment, you will identify clinical areas of interest and inquiry and practice searching for research in support of maintaining or changing these practices. You will also analyze this research to compare research methodologies employed.

After reading each of the four peer-reviewed articles you selected, use the Matrix Worksheet template to analyze the methodologies applied in each of the four peer-reviewed articles. Your analysis should include the following:

• The full citation of each peer-reviewed article in APA format.
• A brief (1-paragraph) statement explaining why you chose this peer-reviewed article and/or how it relates to your clinical issue of interest, including a brief explanation of the ethics of research related to your clinical issue of interest.
• A brief (1-2 paragraph) description of the aims of the research of each peer-reviewed article.
• A brief (1-2 paragraph) description of the research methodology used. Be sure to identify if the methodology used was qualitative, quantitative, or a mixed-methods approach. Be specific.
• A brief (1- to 2-paragraph) description of the strengths of each of the research methodologies used, including reliability and validity of how the methodology was applied in each of the peer-reviewed articles you selected.