A barrier to evidence-based practice in your clinical area
A 250-word cap is the whole difficulty here: you are asked to name a barrier to evidence-based practice on your own unit, pair it with a strategy that actually targets that barrier, and evidence both — so the planning work is choosing narrowly, not writing a survey of everything that gets in the way.
Editorial process
Last reviewed · July 21, 2026
What is the EBP barrier discussion really testing?
The prompt reads as two questions but is really one argument: the strategy has to be the answer to the barrier you named, and a marker can see immediately when it isn't. Most posts fail here rather than on writing quality — they open with the well-worn list (no time, no access, resistant culture), then propose 'more education', which addresses knowledge and does nothing about time.
Notice the phrase your clinical area. It rules out a generic answer. The barrier has to be locatable — a specific unit, shift pattern, or workflow — because that is what lets you say why the strategy is feasible there. 'Nurses lack time' is a category; 'our medication rounds overlap the only protected education hour, so the journal club is attended by two of eighteen staff' is a barrier you can act on.
The reference requirement is one scholarly source, not a bibliography. In 250 words a citation earns its place by supplying something you could not assert alone — a prevalence figure, or evidence that the strategy you chose works. Pick the source after you know your argument, so it supports a claim instead of decorating the post.
There is also a closing move most posts miss. In the 22-study systematic review of community nursing shortlisted below, visible evidence that an innovation improved patient care was itself a facilitator of adoption in 14 of the 22 studies — which means showing the change working is part of the strategy, not an afterthought. Build your final sentence around the indicator you would watch, and you have answered 'how would you know' while giving peers a claim concrete enough to engage with.
Likely learning objectives
- Distinguish a barrier you can observe on your own unit from the generic barriers reported in the literature.
- Match an implementation strategy to the specific mechanism of the barrier, rather than defaulting to education.
- Use a single scholarly source to carry a claim you could not credibly make from experience alone.
- Write to a hard word limit by cutting scope rather than compressing every point into a summary.
Assignment instructions
Read the full question
Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.
Discuss a barrier to evidence-based practice in your clinical area and a strategy to prevent it? 250 words with reference You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes. Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages. Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor. The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument. A barrier to evidence-based practice in your clinical area
Course-wide instructions that accompany this question
ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE CLASS Discussion Questions (DQ) Initial responses to the DQ should address all components of the questions asked, include a minimum of one scholarly source, and be at least 250 words. Successful responses are substantive (i.e., add something new to the discussion, engage others in the discussion, well-developed idea) and include at least one scholarly source. One or two sentence responses, simple statements of agreement or “good post,” and responses that are off-topic will not count as substantive. Substantive responses should be at least 150 words. I encourage you to incorporate the readings from the week (as applicable) into your responses. Weekly Participation Your initial responses to the mandatory DQ do not count toward participation and are graded separately. In addition to the DQ responses, you must post at least one reply to peers (or me) on three separate days, for a total of three replies. Participation posts do not require a scholarly source/citation (unless you cite someone else’s work). Part of your weekly participation includes viewing the weekly announcement and attesting to watching it in the comments. These announcements are made to ensure you understand everything that is due during the week. APA Format and Writing Quality Familiarize yourself with APA format and practice using it correctly. It is used for most writing assignments for your degree. Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for APA paper templates, citation examples, tips, etc. Points will be deducted for poor use of APA format or absence of APA format (if required). Cite all sources of information! When in doubt, cite the source. Paraphrasing also requires a citation. I highly recommend using the APA Publication Manual, 6th edition. Use of Direct Quotes I discourage overutilization of direct quotes in DQs and assignments at the Masters’ level and deduct points accordingly. As Masters’ level students, it is important that you be able to critically analyze and interpret information from journal articles and other resources. Simply restating someone else’s words does not demonstrate an understanding of the content or critical analysis of the content. It is best to paraphrase content and cite your source. LopesWrite Policy For assignments that need to be submitted to LopesWrite, please be sure you have received your report and Similarity Index (SI) percentage BEFORE you do a “final submit” to me. Once you have received your report, please review it. This report will show you grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors that can easily be fixed. Take the extra few minutes to review instead of getting counted off for these mistakes. Review your similarities. Did you forget to cite something? Did you not paraphrase well enough? Is your paper made up of someone else’s thoughts more than your own? Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for tips on improving your paper and SI score. Late Policy The university’s policy on late assignments is 10% penalty PER DAY LATE. This also applies to late DQ replies. Please communicate with me if you anticipate having to submit an assignment late. I am happy to be flexible, with advance notice. We may be able to work out an extension based on extenuating circumstances. If you do not communicate with me before submitting an assignment late, the GCU late policy will be in effect. I do not accept assignments that are two or more weeks late unless we have worked out an extension. As per policy, no assignments are accepted after the last day of class. Any assignment submitted after midnight on the last day of class will not be accepted for grading. Communication Communication is so very important. There are multiple ways to communicate with me: Questions to Instructor Forum: This is a great place to ask course content or assignment questions. If you have a question, there is a good chance one of your peers does as well. This is a public forum for the class. Individual Forum: This is a private forum to ask me questions or send me messages. This will be checked at least once every 24 hours. A barrier to evidence-based practice in your clinical area
Turn the brief into deliverables
- 01A discussion post of roughly 250 words, within your course's tolerance.
- 02One named barrier, anchored to a specific clinical area, shift, or workflow.
- 03One prevention or mitigation strategy that plainly addresses that barrier's cause.
- 04At least one scholarly citation, formatted in your course's style, with a matching reference entry.
How do you structure a barrier-and-strategy post?
Locate the barrier
Open by naming your clinical area and the single barrier you are addressing, concretely enough that a reader can picture it happening.
What the assessor is likely looking for
That this is an observed obstacle in a specific setting, not a barrier borrowed from a literature review.
Show why it blocks evidence uptake
Explain the mechanism — what specifically fails to happen because of it — and bring in your source here if it supplies prevalence or corroboration.
What the assessor is likely looking for
A causal link between the barrier and evidence not reaching the bedside, rather than an assertion that it is a problem.
Propose the strategy that targets it
Give one strategy and make the fit explicit: name the part of the barrier it removes and why it is feasible on your unit.
What the assessor is likely looking for
That the strategy answers this barrier specifically and could realistically be run in the setting described.
Close on how you would know it worked
Finish with the change you would expect to see — an observable indicator, not a hope — which also gives peers something concrete to reply to.
What the assessor is likely looking for
Evidence of implementation thinking: the student anticipates evaluation rather than stopping at the proposal.
Where is the evidence on EBP barriers and strategies?
Recommended databases
- CINAHL
- PubMed / PubMed Central
- Cochrane Library
- Your institution's nursing practice guidelines or intranet
Search sequence
- 1.Search CINAHL or PubMed for `evidence-based practice` AND `barriers` AND (`nurses` OR `nursing`), limiting to the last ten years and to peer-reviewed work.
- 2.Add a term for your own setting — community, critical care, primary care, perioperative — because barriers differ sharply by context and a setting-matched study is far more persuasive.
- 3.Once you have chosen a strategy, run a second, separate search on that strategy (mentorship, EBP champions, protected time, journal club) to find evidence it works. This is the search most students skip.
- 4.Check whether your employer or national body publishes an EBP or research-utilisation policy; naming it shows the barrier is real inside your own governance structure.
- 5.Choose the one source that best supports your specific claim, and confirm you can access the full text rather than citing from the abstract.
Reference shortlist
These are authoritative starting points, not a ready-made bibliography. A qualified reviewer must confirm that each source fits the assignment and supports the claim beside which it is cited.
Barriers to the Adoption of Evidence Based Practice in Nursing: a Focus Group Study
PMC, National Library of Medicine · 2024
Qualitative accounts of why nurses do not adopt evidence in practice — useful for describing the mechanism of your barrier in the words practitioners actually use.
Strategies, facilitators and barriers to implementation of evidence-based practice in community nursing: a systematic mixed-studies review and qualitative synthesis
PMC, National Library of Medicine · 2019
Pairs barriers with the strategies that address them, which is exactly the link this post has to make. Strongest choice if your clinical area is community-based.
Implementing evidence-based practice: effectiveness of a structured multifaceted mentorship programme
PMC, National Library of Medicine · 2011
Evidence that mentorship changes EBP beliefs and implementation — cite this if your strategy is a mentor, champion, or ARCC-style model rather than a teaching session.
Nursing Professional Development Evidence-Based Practice
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf · 2023
A compact orientation to EBP models and the organisational conditions they need. Use it to check your framing, not as the scholarly source that carries your argument.
Review before submission
Common mistakes
- Listing four or five barriers. The prompt asks for one, and a list leaves no room to argue the strategy.
- Proposing education or 'raising awareness' for a barrier that is structural — if the obstacle is time or access, teaching does not remove it.
- Describing the barrier in the abstract so it could belong to any unit anywhere, which forfeits the 'your clinical area' requirement.
- Citing a source that supports the existence of EBP barriers in general rather than the specific claim being made.
- Spending half the word count defining evidence-based practice. The reader already knows; definitions are the cheapest words to cut.
- Choosing a barrier whose fix is above your pay grade — staffing ratios, the EHR contract. The prompt wants a strategy feasible on your unit, so pick a barrier whose lever you could actually pull.
- Quoting the literature's barrier taxonomy back instead of your own unit's version of it. The source corroborates your barrier; it cannot supply it.
Submission checklist
- The barrier is tied to a named setting, not to nursing in general.
- The strategy would still make sense if the barrier were removed — if it would, the two are not connected.
- Word count is close to 250; count it rather than estimating.
- At least one scholarly source is cited in text and appears in the reference list.
- The post makes a claim a peer could disagree with, so replies have something to engage.
- The closing names one observable indicator — attendance, an audit result, order-set uptake — not a hope that awareness improves.
Use this guide to plan and review your own work. Follow your institution's rules and read Brinevia's academic-integrity policy.
Written by
Ryan Harper
MSc, Health Sciences
evidence-based practice implementation and care-transition safety
Ryan leads the Brinevia editorial desk. He works on how nursing coursework briefs translate into a plan a student can actually execute on a real unit.
Reviewed by
Dr. Laura Bennett
DNP, RN, CNE
Evidence-based practice and clinical education
Laura is a doctorally-prepared nurse educator. She reviews Brinevia content for clinical accuracy and alignment with current evidence-based guidelines.