the organization,” said Houlihan. The second cohort, held in 2017, included an additional 104 participants from across the MSK nursing spectrum. A third cohort is planned for June 2018. MSK and the Fuld Institute for EBP maintain the momentum with regular check-in meetings with each team. Browne and Houlihan both credit Elizabeth Nelkin McCormick, MSN, RN, CENP, MSK senior vice president and chief nursing officer, with helping make this partnership happen.
across the system to work with the same tools. “We were experiencing major growth and expansion, yet our goal was to maintain our mission of One MSK: the same quality and the same care across the hospitals,” said MSK Director of Nursing, EBP, Nancy G. Houlihan, MA, RN, AOCN. “We already had a good structure in place; we were able to add EBP to sustain efforts and bring value to the organization.” The first Fuld Institute for EBP/MSK cohort, held in 2016, had 104 attendees, including MSK nursing leadership and other nursing professionals. Attendees participated in a five-day EBP immersion with two distinct tracks: leader or mentor. This cohort worked on 17 high-priority evidencebased quality improvement initiatives during the immersion and over the following 15 months, applying their newly acquired EBP knowledge and skills to drive best practices and achieve improved outcomes for patients and clinicians.
Browne said the partnership has done much to strengthen MSK’s EBP infrastructure. “The acculturation of the program was what we hoped for. We had a desire to leverage the clinical nurse specialist work effort. We wanted to involve leadership. We wanted to use EBP as a career advancement model. This framework has allowed us to do that.” MSK is using what they have learned in the Fuld partnership to expand EBP to other healthcare disciplines within its system, including supportive services. MSK doctors are becoming aware of the EBP model, too. Said Gallagher-Ford: “If every hospital in the country would engage in EBP as Memorial Sloan Kettering has, I believe we could change the world.”
This cohort implemented many evidencebased initiatives, including full integration of EBP into the new RN graduate nurse residency program and significant restructuring of the organization’s preceptor program. They added EBP language into the Department of Nursing quality and safety plan and strengthened clinical nurse job descriptions with EBP language. “We were lucky to have some early adopters in EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE | 43