Ideas That Work: A Visional Way to Get a Journal Club Going

Practical pearls from your colleagues

Departments looking to foster professional development will often decide to start a journal club. But these departments tend to struggle with where to begin. While she was a master’s degree student working at a day surgery center, Kate Wolf, MSN, RN, CNOR, came up with a novel way to get the ball rolling.

A literature review offered Ms. Wolf found major themes of journal club structure, participant discussion, practice changes and topic selection, but there wasn’t much information on the actual getting-started process, so she chose to tackle participation and topic selection in one fell swoop by creating a vision board on the whiteboard in the breakroom. “I’m a Millennial and a bit of a hippie, so a vision board made sense to me,” says Ms. Wolf.

The vision board was an easy, low-cost solution — to gather as much feedback from staff as possible. The first edition of the board included notes and ideas about different topics and a flyer which included the objectives of the journal club and the date. Staff was given two weeks to write down their own ideas, and then Ms. Wolf compiled the results and identified the common themes.

“I wanted to make sure that the chosen article was of interest to the group, and that it would add value,” she says. “I didn’t want to present an article about pediatric burn units to nurses who wanted to learn more about chemotherapy agents or robotic surgery. With this being the first journal club, I wanted the nurses to have buy in from the onset and enjoy learning!”

Ms. Wolf’s second vision board had more information about the literature on journal club. While the nurses had time to absorb this information, she began the search for the “perfect” article. (A huge lesson that Ms. Wolf learned: “Don’t force the ‘perfect’ article!”) Eventually she found an article that focused on treatment of postoperative nausea and vomiting. Ms. Wolf made sure that the article was open access so she could freely share it, and then distributed it with a short guide to help the nurses focus their thoughts while reading. She then created a pre- and post- questionnaire to see if and how nurses’ thoughts changed during the journal club discussion — and to provide a space for additional comments and potential plans for changing practice.

When it finally came time for the club to discuss the article, there were five nurses who read it and attended the meeting. Qualitative data showed that the nurses who participated in the journal club discussion gained new knowledge and insight into their current practice as well as potential changes they could make.

Ms. Wolf sums up the primary benefit of the endeavor succinctly: “One journal club discussion isn’t enough to change practice, but it is enough to get nurses excited about it.” OSM