Practice writing out PICO components and forming a focused question with the case studies below. Remember to consider:
Population: What are the most important characteristics? Are there relevant demographic factors like age, weight, sex, or race? Is your population nursing students or hospital administration?
Intervention: What is the main intervention, treatment, diagnostic test, procedure, or exposure? Think of dosage, frequency, duration, and mode of delivery.
Comparison: Are there any inactive control interventions such as placebo, standard care, or no treatment? Are there active control interventions such as a different drug, dose, or type of therapy?
Outcome: What do you want as the end result of your intervention? Be specific and make it measurable. This can be something objective, like blood pressure or temperature, or subjective, such as a pain scale.
More examples can be found on the Forming Questions with PICO guide from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
You are a nurse working in an inpatient medical surgical unit. The patients admitted to your unit have a wide variety of conditions, but all of the patients who are chronic tobacco smokers are given brief counseling by an RN and a self-help brochure about smoking cessation. You want to see if these experiences lead chronic smokers to quit smoking.
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Among hospitalized chronic smokers (P), does a brief educational nursing intervention (I) lead to long term smoking cessation (O) when compared with no intervention (C)?
Patients on coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) waiting lists often experience anxiety and depression and your nurse manager wants to know if it would be a good idea to reach out to these patients with presurgical home visits and follow-up calls from a cardiac nurse specialist.
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For patients on CABG waiting lists (P), does an intervention program consisting of presurgical home visits and follow-up calls from a specialist cardiac nurse (I) lead to decreased patient anxiety and depression (O) when compared with no intervention(C)?
You work in the Big City Hospital ICU. Your mechanically ventilated patients sometimes contract nosocomial pneumonia, which leads to costly complications. You want to know if raising the head of the bed lowers the chance of the patient contracting pneumonia compared to letting the patient lie flat on their back.
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In mechanically ventilated ICU patients (P), does positioning the patient in semi-fowlers (I) result in a lower incidence of nosocomial pneumonia (O) when compared to the supine position (C)?
