Diabetes evidence-based practice project: a planning guide

This record contains two linked deliverables and it is worth seeing them as one project before starting either. The paper summarises the main idea of a research or evidence-based article about a specific intervention or new diagnostic tool for diabetes; the presentation then summarises that research again briefly and spends most of its slides on how the tool or intervention may be integrated into practice. Both rest on the same article. That makes article selection the highest-leverage decision in the whole assignment, and it is one most students make in five minutes. Spend an hour on it instead; every later difficulty in this project traces back to an article that could not carry the weight put on it.

Choose the article against the second deliverable rather than the first. Any competent study can be summarised; not every study supports an integration argument. What you need is an intervention or diagnostic tool that a nursing service could plausibly adopt, with a defined population, a reported effect size, and enough detail about how it was delivered that you could describe implementing it. A trial of a drug regimen prescribed by endocrinologists gives nursing little to integrate; a study of continuous glucose monitoring, a structured education programme, a screening tool or a nurse-led protocol gives you a great deal. The brief's own phrasing — a specific intervention or new diagnostic tool — is a hint that a monitoring or screening technology is welcome, and those tend to have the richest implementation literature.

The brief specifies a specific patient population, and the phrase does real work. Diabetes evidence differs sharply between type 1 and type 2, between adults and children, between insulin-treated and non-insulin-treated patients, and between newly diagnosed and long-established disease. Say which population your article studied and hold to it. A paper that summarises a trial in insulin-treated adults and then discusses integration in a paediatric clinic has crossed a line the evidence does not support, and stating the population precisely is also what makes your later claims checkable. If the population you would like to serve differs from the one studied, say so and treat the difference as a limitation rather than quietly generalising across it.

On summarising research findings, precision beats enthusiasm. Report what the study measured, in whom, against what comparator, and by how much — with the confidence interval or the authors' own certainty rating if they give one. Recent continuous glucose monitoring evidence is a useful illustration of why: pooled trials find an HbA1c reduction of roughly 0.3 percentage points with improved time in range, at moderate certainty, with the authors explicitly noting that data on severe hypoglycaemia and long-term complications remain scarce and that the trials were open-label. A summary that reports the benefit and omits the certainty has misrepresented the source. Quote the authors' own framing where you can; a systematic review that describes its evidence as moderate certainty has done the appraisal work for you, and repeating that judgement is more defensible than substituting your own.

The integration discussion is where the presentation earns its marks and it should be concrete about the nursing work involved. Integration means naming who does what differently: which staff need training and how much, what changes in the assessment or documentation, what the patient has to do and whether they can, what it costs and who pays, and what could make it fail. The brief asks for a discussion that is both descriptive and reflective, so include the reflective element honestly — what you are uncertain about, what the evidence does not tell you, and what you would want to see before recommending adoption widely. Reflective does not mean personal here; it means willing to say what you do not know. A slide that names two open questions reads as more competent than one asserting that the intervention should be adopted everywhere.

On mechanics, the two deliverables have different rules and both are stated. The paper is 750 to 1,000 words in APA with no abstract required; the presentation is a title slide, six to twelve slides and a reference slide, under 2 MB, with APA in-text citations and references even though full APA format is not required for the slide body. Both go through Turnitin as Word documents. The file size limit is a real constraint if you plan to include images, and it is the sort of requirement that is easy to breach at the last minute. Compress images before inserting them rather than afterwards, and check the file size once the deck is finished rather than assuming it is fine.