One of the distinct characteristics of the nursing craft is the professionals’ need to constantly adapt to the dynamic environment of health care service and approaches to patient care. In order to facilitate this process, researchers have identified a series of change theories that seek to systematize the experience of implementing new practices (Udod & Wagner, 2018). The two most widespread theories of change in the nursing practice are Lewin’s change theory and Roger’s five-step theory. In Lewin’s framework, the change process undergoes three major stages: unfreezing, change proper, and refreezing (Udod & Wagner, 2018). Thus, according to this framework, in order to introduce change, the team needs to acknowledge the existing workflow and “unfreeze” this system, actively participate in implementing change and new functional patterns, and, finally, make the change a new generally accepted standard.
Unlike Lewin’s approach, Roger’s model is more oriented towards the staff’s response and acceptance of the change through the gradual shifting process. Indeed, this five-step model implies exhaustive preliminary research, gathering staff’s feedback, conducting a pilot study, and actually implementing the change proposal (Udod & Wagner, 2018). Hence, it may be concluded that while Lewin’s model addresses mostly the implementation of the evidence-proven modifications, the five-step model is designed to prove the suggested change beneficial to the clinical environment.
When speaking of the change proposal for the capstone project, Roger’s approach to change implementation is more appropriate. Considering the fact that the project seeks to justify the hypothesis of the EBP training’s positive impact on nurses’ self-esteem and patient satisfaction, the data collected from the intervention will be crucial for further implementation of this change to nursing practice. This theory has also been proven advantageous by the preceptor, as she has successfully integrated changes into the staff’s scheduling patterns using Roger’s model.