Columbus Publishers

International Journal of Nursing and Health Care Science

Volume 02: Issue 09

Guthrie DR.

### Table 1:

Demographics.

### Barriers to Evidence Uptake into Policies

The single largest characteristics identified as the greatest barrier to evidence uptake into policies at the healthcare organization (Table 2) were characteristics of the organization-setting barriers and limitations (mean: 2.76, standard deviation: 0.63); followed by characteristics of the communication-presentation and accessibility of the evidence (mean: 2.41, standard deviation: 0.66); then, characteristics of the innovation- qualities of the evidence (mean: 2.22, standard deviation: 0.65); and, finally, characteristics of the adopter- the public health professional’s value of evidence, skills with evidence uptake, and awareness of the evidence base (mean: 2.08, standard deviation: 0.54). These findings are consistent with previous studies, in which organizational support was cited as a top barrier [12]. The rank ordering of the 29 barriers in the percentage of items perceived by the healthcare organizations’ administrators as great or moderate barriers are summarized in (Table 3). The top three cited barriers reported in the study were: 1. Political influence often interferes with evidence uptake, 2. The administrator does not feel empowered to change public health policy, and 3. Higher administrative influence often interferes with evidence uptake.

The survey contained a free response question asking if there were other things the respondent thought were barriers to the uptake of evidence into policies. Ten participants wrote a response to the question (Table 4). Summative content analysis [15] was used to interpret the context of these free text responses and a corresponding BARRIERS scale factor was assigned. Interestingly, most of the free text responses aligned with the Likert scale findings showing the two top groups of barrier characteristics as organizational & communication. Indeed, organizational barriers, the largest identified in the Likert portion of the survey, were implied as a barrier in 80% of the comments.

Min	Max	Mean	Std.Dev.
Factor 1- Characteristics of the Adopter	1.14	3.17	2.0847	0.5408
Factor 2- Characteristics of the Organization	1.43	3.8	2.7586	0.62985
Factor 3- Characteristics of the Innovation	1.2	3.5	2.2222	0.64901
Factor 4- Characteristics of the Communication	1.33	3.5	2.4083	0.66031

### Table 2:

BARRIERS Scale Factors.

Barrier Items	Item mean score (SD) rank order	Reporting item as Moderate or Great Barrier (% )*	Responding "No option" or No Response (%)
Political influence often interferes with evidence uptake	2.56(1.60)	60.7	2.5
The PHP does not feel Empowered to change public health policy	2.48(1.55)	50	21.5
Administrative influence often interferes with Evidence Uptake	2.32(1.54)	60.7	17.9
The PHP feels results are not generalizable to own setting	2.15 (1.35)	42.9	25
The relevant literature is not compiled in one place	2.11 (1.52)	53.6	25
Evidenced-based ( EB) reports/articles are not readily available	2.07 (1.51)	42.9	28.6
Statistical analyses are not understandable	2.07(1.21)	35.7	28.5
The PHP is unaware of (EB) reports/articles	1.96(1.40)	32.2	25
The PHP does not have time to read EB reports articles	1.93 (1.41)	39.3	21.5