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The Dalhousie School of Nursing has taken another step to becoming a major facilitator of evidence-based health research in Atlantic Canada. As of August 3, 2016, the School of Nursing began a 3-year partnership with the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI). A not-for-profit research centre that promotes evidence based practice, JBI aims to improve the quality of global healthcare through the sharing of health-related research internationally. The JBI is complementary to, and collaborates with, the Cochrane database.

Using the JBI methodology, the School of Nursing will offer research synthesis and translation services to the health services and policy sectors and build capacity in the conduct of systematic reviews. Trained faculty and graduate students will have access to a variety of tools through JBI to conduct systematic reviews of the research on any health-related topic.

“It [training] gives you an avenue to be a part of influencing teaching method development and analysis within the discipline,” says Timothy Disher, a nursing PhD student who is JBI certified.

Joining a world leader in research synthesis and promotion

“The Joanna Briggs Institute came into being in 1996,” says Dr. Marilyn Macdonald, Professor and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie’s School of Nursing. “Gradually, over the twenty years that they have existed, they have designed approaches for the review of a variety of evidence, whether it be qualitative or quantitative.”

“Some health care questions do not lend themselves to traditional experimental research methods but we still need better information to make vital decisions about health care.”

JBI is an all-encompassing and large scale research and review institute whose methodology will enable the Dal School of Nursing to build on current health research capacity. Access to the JBI database will ensure that a greater quantity and quality of evidence and research can be uncovered and analysed by those who need it, improving health care policy and delivery decision making. The flexibility of JBI’s research model will also allow Dal to provide research synthesis services that include multiple research designs.

Only seven universities in Canada have affiliations with JBI. On a national scale, Dalhousie is the largest east coast research university with a JBI affiliate. While each group is separate, the JBI model ensures that research reports and systematic reviews are shared. Each time a report is completed it becomes accessible to all partnerships with JBI, which includes over 80 entities internationally, and growing.

A partnership long in the making

Dr. Macdonald, who led the process of developing the Dal-JBI partnership, says that it started in the summer of 2013, when the first five individuals at Dalhousie began their training.

“A year ago [this past] April or May, I started writing the proposal to become an affiliate group,” Dr. Macdonald says. “In March [2016], we received communication from JBI that we were approved conditionally and the legal agreement between Dalhousie and JBI was signed on August 3, 2016, when the partnership officially began.

Serving the broader health community

This affiliation will not only be beneficial for Dalhousie, but will impact Nova Scotia’s health care system more broadly. Researchers, health care professionals, hospital managers and other organizations will be able to come to Dalhousie with a health-related inquiry, and JBI trained personnel can assist them with research.

“We’ve actually just begun to scratch the surface of the resources and services that we can acquire and subsequently provide to our clinical stakeholders and partners in Nova Scotia and beyond,” Dr. Macdonald adds.