Background:Over the past 15 years, evidence-based practice has emerged as a major policy theme in Western healthcare systems. Evidence-based practice has been promoted in Taiwan for more than 10 years. At present, evidence-based practice has been considered the best tool for discovering and solving clinical problems of nursing staffs. Since we have taught evidence-based practice skills in the department of nursing in a medical centre of northern Taiwan, it’s high time to examine the attitude of developing evidence-based practice of nurses.

Objectives:The objectives of this study were to realise the result and explore the factors influencing the development of evidence-based practice of clinical nurses.

Methods:A cross-sectional study was designed to explore the attitudes of clinical nursing staffs by developing evidence-based practice questionnaire traditional Chinese version. The questionnaire was placed on the nursing department website. We send the invitation email and the questionnaire web address link to the head nurses of every unit in nursing department, and then asked them to transfer the mail to the staffs of the unit.

Results:A total of 1227 valid questionnaires were received. The average age of the nurses was 33.46 ± 8.51 years old. The seniority was 18.27 ± 6.78 years. Nursing clinical status N2, order level nurses, university degree and unmarried were majority. In Bases of practice knowledge dimension, the senior clinical staffs shared information most. The biggest barriers to finding and reviewing evidence and to changing practice on the basis of evidence was insufficient time at work. The greatest supporters are nursing supervisors, the least supporters are physicians. We found nursing clinical status, job title, whether trained by evidence-based courses and statistical classes were significant factors of 5 sections of developing evidence-based practice (p<.05).

Conclusions: Nursing clinical status, job titles, trained by evidence-based and statistical courses were the significant factors influencing developing evidence-based practice. We suggested that we can promote evidence-based practice from these groups and these courses.