In the early 1990s, when professor of nursing Susan Moch was doing research on breast cancer, she approached practicing nurses about reading her research findings to determine if they would be open to employing new methods in the field.

What she found went on to ignite more than 15 years of research by using undergraduate nursing students to integrate scientific evidence into health care practice through practicing nurses. This culminated into a three-part article series co-authored by Moch and associate professor of English Ruth Cronje to be published in the Journal of Professional Nursing.

The focus of the three-part series is on removing traditional barriers and better serving patients by implementing care supported by current evidence from biomedical research methods, according to a university press release.

The first part of the series is a literature review. For the second part, Moch described it as being about the process of figuring out ways to evaluate how effective students working with nurses or health care people is, in practice.

In some of the studies for this section, Moch said post evaluations, asking whether the students learned or whether the people in practice thought it was helpful, were conducted. Later, more pretests and posttests were used to see what was learned from the experience and what individuals got out of it.

Finally, the third part discusses the possibilities for the future. Moch described it as an action research process where evaluation was happening as it went along.

“Practitioners like working with undergraduate students, they respect the undergraduate students, and then the undergraduate students are thrilled that they get to work with practicing nurses and that practicing nurses want to know more about recent knowledge, they just don’t have time to get it,” Moch said.

The process to get the articles published started when Moch began working with Cronje. After compiling the three sections, the pair called the editor of the Journal of Professional Nursing and asked if she would be open to having all three of the parts at the same time, since they went together. The editor was

interested in all three of them and wanted to see them in at the same time, so Moch said she went ahead and submitted them.

“Now we are going to try and have UWEC be more of a center of evidence-based practice,” Moch said. “We know this seems to work, we know undergraduate students want to do this. and we want to get funding for more projects so more students can be involved and more students can work with different health care agencies.”