This Best Practice project is intended to facilitate optimal patient care using the best available evidence. It helps translate good intentions in to good practice, benefiting both health professionals and the patients we care for.

Getting evidence in to practice has been a key strategic goal of successful healthcare providers around the world. Measuring metrics and nurse sensitive indicators has provided new evidence for the effectiveness of nursing care.  Now it is time to bring the focus to a fundamental of care: insertion and management of indwelling urethral catheters for adult patients.

Why this topic? Why this approach?

The evidence from the CDC’s high quality guideline is clear. 

As health professionals, and health care providers, we can do better. We can facilitate better patient experiences and outcomes, we can decrease infection rates, and we can improve the quality of practical care provision. 

However, past practice has been for individual sites to undertake small projects, where the results are often unclear, ambiguous and knowledge transfer between health professionals is limited, decreasing the impact, decreasing the opportunity to improve the structures and processes of care.

This project is different.

In this project, hospitals across the USA, and globally are working together to implement known best practice, to innovate, to contribute to better patient care through sharing of knowledge, methods and outcomes. This quality improvement project will specifically collate evidence on three core domains:

In this way the process is shared, the knowledge gained is shared, and the improved outcomes generated are based on reliable and valid evidence. As health professionals, we share a common desire to improve the quality of care and outcomes.  We look forward to working with you to achieve these goals, and develop a shared body of knowledge that benefits all participating hospitals, staff and patients.



Yours Sincerely,

Professor Alan Pearson AM
Executive Director, the Joanna Briggs Institute