Evidence based practice, and the spirit of inquiry: The Asian example

Evidence based practice (EBP) does not go unnoticed in the healthcare setting in the 21st century. The valued presence of EBP is recognized by the healthcare professionals, educators, health policy makers, private and public payer systems as well as well-informed patients and their families. However, it is not always easy to grasp how well EBP is integrated into the neonatal nurses' daily practices or how well it is understood in concrete terms by the neonatal nursing work force. In this article, the author attempts to provide relevance of foundational concept of EBP to the daily routine seen in the common neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) setting and invites the readers to welcome the concept of EBP as a friendly presence and begin the process by developing the “spirit of inquiry”. Two recent situations are described as examples of how valuable nurses' inquiries are to the vulnerable infants in the NICU setting. The “spirit of inquiry” found among the nurses in Japan and South Korea are likely to be very similar to the inquiry found in the readers' unit in the western world.