PICOT is an approach that assists the nurses and the other healthcare practitioners to come up with specific, measurable and researchable questions with a potential of improving the client’s outcomes. By identifying such a clinical issue by such five parts, the nurses shall be in a better position in conducting their search for more evidence as required.
Every nurse who participates in research activities or clinical practice or teaching must have a clear understanding of how to use the PICOT questions. It does not only affect the nature of the questions being posed but also enhances the nature and usability of the evidence collected as well.
In this article, readers will be able to understand the role and significance of PICOT in the nursing profession, good and bad examples of using PICOT questions, as well as how to create proper ones.
Examples of Good PICOT Questions for Nursing
These cases show that PICOT questions can be applied to various clinical situations and enable concise research that can be applied to nursing practice.
Chronic pain in postoperative patients
- P: Abdominal surgery can be classified as major surgery and patients operating with this kind of surgery are often postoperative patients.
- I: Patient controlled analgesia PCA
- C: Nurse-administered analgesia
- O: Outcome: Patients, pain and satisfaction
- T: Up to the 48 hours after the surgery
- PICOT Question: Compared to the nurse-administered analgesia, does the patient-controlled analgesia result in lesser mean pain scores, and higher patients’ satisfaction within the initial 48 hours postoperatively in patients who have undergone abdominal surgery?
The general need for quitting smoking in pregnant women
- P: Smoking during pregnancy
- I: Behavioral counseling
- C: Standard prenatal care without receiving any information counseling.
- O: Smoking cessation rates
- T: At full term, Increasing capacitance of tissues during pregnancy has caused opposite changes of compliance of tissues and organs in the body.
- PICOT Question: For pregnant women smokers, does behavioral counseling more than standard antenatal care increase the smoking cessation by the time of delivery?
Improving Vaccination Rates
- P: It was found that the level of child abuse in the households with children below the age of five years.
- I: Parents Reminder and Recall systems
- C: No reminder system
- O: Vaccination rates
- T: In one year’s time
- PICOT Question: It is about young children (under 5 years old) use of reminder and recall for the parents differ with no reminder system on the percentage change in vaccination within the one year period?
How to Develop a Good PICOT Question
Development of a good PICOT question is the cornerstone of all research activities and the nursing practice in particular. The good and well-developed PICOT question works like a roadmap and helps in navigating the identified clinical problem, and in the selection of literature that gives evidence for supporting concerns.
Describe the Clinical Issue or Problem
- First, identify a problem or scenario that must be examined or enhanced in a clinical setting. The following issue should matter in your practice and be important enough to investigate.
Analyze the Components of the PICOT Construction
- Population/Patient (P): Specify the patient type, or group, that you are interested in as a researcher. This could be specific demographics, diseases or environments that the patient was in.
- Intervention (I): Identify the type of intervention or treatment which you wish to research. This could be a certain type of therapy, drug or kind of care to be provided to the patient.
- Comparison (C): Determine the basis on which the intervention will be measured. This could be a placebo or another therapy or no treatment at all. Sometimes, possibly, there is no control group as well.
- Outcome (O): Specify the goal in either of the two ways that is, the desired outcome or the expected outcome. This leads to a number of questions, one of which is what do you want to happen as a result of the intervention or what do you want to measure? This can be a patient’s health, less symptoms, or more satisfaction level with the health care services.
- Time (T): Quantify the period within which change will be measured after the initiation of the intervention. This could either in a few days and even up to several months depending on the width and depth of the study.
Construct the PICOT Question
- Put the elements together into a question. Make sure that you avoid vague questions and that the question is precise and relates to the clinical problem. It should be specific enough that helps in the identification of research questions, but, on the other hand, it should at the same time remain broad enough to enable the researcher to find adequate evidence.
Refine the Question
- Revisit your developed PICOT question and analyze the complexity, conciseness, relevance and answerability of the actual question. Modify parts which are either too general or too detailed.
Resources for Creating PICOT Questions in Nursing
Increasing the effectiveness of nursing research and EBP is possible if the main focus is aimed at developing and promoting well-constructed PICOT questions. There are a myriad of resources that a nurse can use to generate and also improve on their PICOT questions.
- Books
There are books that show them how to apply research in their practice which are used by trained nurses. These books show how to conduct good questions with the use of methods known as PICOT.
- Online Libraries
There are numerous nursing articles in websites such as PubMed and CINAHL. You can look at these to see how other nurses ask research questions.
- Nursing Groups
There is information about the use of research in nursing available through the various large nursing associations such as the American Nurses Association.
- Classes and Workshops
The classes can be taken in many schools and hospitals with an intention of acquainting the nurses with research. There are also some websites that have offered online classes about this such as Coursera.
- Question-Making Tools
On trying to frame out good research questions, there are methods available on the web.
- Guides
There are those which had prepared handbooks to assist the nurses in their understanding of research. Many of them tell how good questions can be asked.
- Help from Experts
Getting advice from other professional nurses or teachers may prove to be very useful when time comes for a student to propose a good research question.
- School and Hospital Libraries
Most schools provide nursing training and many hospitals have special libraries from where you can seek assistance in research.
- Nursing Magazines
Nursing magazines are good sources for finding good research questions because when you read articles in these nursing magazines you can come up with good research questions.
- Online Groups
There are on-line forums in which nurses discuss their occupation. It is possible to seek assistance with research questions in the aforementioned groups.
Conclusion
Implementing sound and well-developed PICOT questions to nursing practice is one of the most effective techniques of strengthening the use of EBP and the enhancement of patient care. These questions have been well formulated so that nurses can capture relevant evidence after delving into a specific area and make direct application in clinical scenarios.
This kind of structured approach does help to enhance critical thinking and promote the culture of change and development within the healthcare system. The development of adequate and well formulated PICOT questions enables nurses to perform informed decisions regarding the treatment they are going to offer and how to do it in order to accommodate the needs of the patient.
FAQs
Can a Nurse Write a PICOT Question?
Yes, a nurse can write the PICOT questions, in particular if a nurse is engaged in the research or evidence-based practice. PICOT questions are crucial to the professional practice of nurses by helping the nurses to structure questions that allow for effective searching for evidence and assessing patient care outcomes.
PICOT questions help a nurse to define the issue precisely, identify the intervention and comparison, define the desired result, and choose a proper time frame for the study. It helps in maintaining structure to the research conducted, ensures its relevance and makes it as practical as possible to actual clinical setting.
What Makes a Good PICOT Question?
A good PICOT question is clearly presented, specific and relevant to a clinical issue that requires a solver. It must contain all of the elements which are included in the construction of a PICOT question and these elements should be clear. The question should be researchable, in a contemporary sense of the phrase, which may imply that it should be possible to ‘Google’ it.
The definition of a good PICOT question implies that the question should be relevant in patient care, and involve concepts that could be applied to changing patient care practice and/or affecting patients’ health results. Finally, the question must be realistic and design, this means that the nurse or the research team has to have access to the needed resources and data that will help to solve it.
What Are PICOT Questions?
PICOT questions are clinical questions in evidence-based practice that will help in identifying evidence that can be applied in clinical practice. These questions enable clinical questions to be split into small aspects besides offering nurses, or indeed any other health care professional, an efficient method of approaching a clinical dilemma.
Nurses can come up with the relevant questions by identifying patients’ needs and the objective of the study in the PICOT structure, and then contrast the different interventions toward determining the outcomes within a given duration of time. These PICOT questions are important for doing proper research that has enhanced value in enhancing patient care.
