TOPIC: Reduce the risk of patient and resident harm resulting from falls. TJC Goal 9 for nurses
A PICOT question is utilized to help plan for research i.e, define search terms for a clinical problems and ultimately, hopefully to guide quality improvement and research. The PICOT process requires that key elements be defined. These are Population, Interventions, Comparisons, Outcomes, and Time. Time can be an optional component but only for certain circumstances. If time can be applied to the situation, it needs to be used. You will be formulating your own PICOT question based on a clinical issue. This can be a clinical issue that you already see in nursing practice. ie CAUTI, CLABSI, medication administration errors etc. There are a multitude of clinical issues that could be found.
It can be helpful to do a literature search and to pull articles to further define your clinical issue and PICOT. You may also find multiple ways to write a PICOT. One note about PICOT is that it is important to realize that when we say Population – we are often using it generically and not in its true statistical sense. This is because a PICOT is NOT the actual quality improvement project nor is it actually the research process. The PICOT exists to help with the scientific process of starting a literature search on an issue. If you look up a clinical issue on PubMed and then a few years later, a colleague wants to look up the same issue, you both would want to be able to compare results. For example, if you look up an issue about readmissions and have 81 results but in three years someone looks up readmissions and has 1000 results, other a lot of research was done and published OR the same search terms weren’t utilized. This is where the PICOT can help guide searches.
