Background: Health practitioners play a pivotal role in providing patients with up-to-date evidence and health\r\ninformation. Evidence-based practice and patient-centred care are transforming the delivery of healthcare in the UK.\r\nHealth practitioners are increasingly balancing the need to provide evidence-based information against that of\r\nfacilitating patient choice, which may not always concur with the evidence base. There is limited research exploring\r\nhow health practitioners working in the UK, and particularly those more autonomous practitioners such as health\r\nvisitors and practice nurses working in community practice settings, negotiate this challenge. This research provides\r\na descriptive account of how health visitors and practice nurses negotiate the challenges of communicating health\r\ninformation and research evidence in practice.\r\nMethods: A total of eighteen in-depth telephone interviews were conducted in the UK between September 2008\r\nand May 2009. The participants comprised nine health visitors and nine practice nurses, recruited via adverts on a\r\nnursing website, posters at a practitioner conference and through recommendation. Thematic analysis, with a focus\r\non constant comparative method, was used to analyse the data.\r\nResults: The data were grouped into three main themes: communicating evidence to the critically-minded patient;\r\nconfidence in communicating evidence; and maintaining the integrity of the patient-practitioner relationship. These\r\nfindings highlight some of the daily challenges that health visitors and practice nurses face with regard to the\r\ncomplex and dynamic nature of evidence and the changing attitudes and expectations of patients. The findings\r\nalso highlight the tensions that exist between differing philosophies of evidence-based practice and patient-centred\r\ncare, which can make communicating about evidence a daunting task.\r\nConclusions: If health practitioners are to be effective at communicating research evidence, we suggest that more\r\nresearch and resources need to be focused on contextual factors, such as how research evidence is negotiated,\r\nappraised and communicated within the dynamic patient-practitioner relationship.
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