Do the right thing
Alumna embraces evidence-based practice
Don’t say “because we’ve always done it that way” in front of Lynn Gallagher-Ford ’81.
The Long Island, N.Y., native is a leader in the field of evidence-based practice (EBP), a problem-solving approach to clinical-based decisions that integrates the clinician’s expertise with the most current, relevant research available.
Gallagher-Ford stumbled upon the discipline in 2005 after nearly three decades of holding a variety of nursing leadership and administrative positions.
“A friend and I were ‘doctorate shopping’ and right at the same time evidence-based practice started to emerge in the nursing literature,” she says. “EBP resonated perfectly with me. I’ve always wanted to know what’s new and on the cutting edge. And now it suddenly had a name!”
Gallagher-Ford followed her passion to become a sought-after educator in EBP. She directs the Center for Transdisciplinary Evidence-Based Practice at The Ohio State University College of Nursing. According to Gallagher-Ford, only three out of 10 clinicians are evidence-based practitioners. She and her team travel nationally and internationally to run five-day EBP immersion workshops.
“We bring our whole team to a hospital where they get a huge infusion of this expertise, and they can bring as many people as they want,” she says. “There’s no such thing as evidence-based nursing or physical therapy or social work. I teach you the skill set — how to ask the correct questions, search databases effectively, pull the literature and how to understand the literature in order to answer your question. You then apply it to your individual practice. It’s a shared competency so that when we come to the bedside we’re all evidence based.”
Gallagher-Ford says it’s rewarding when attendees tell her how EBP was a “game changer” for their organization.
“When I know I’ve changed one bedside clinician to help them think differently so that they know they’re giving their patients the best care, of course that’s great for the patient, but it’s also extraordinarily important to clinicians,” she says. “People become clinicians because they want to do the right thing and take good care of people. When they start using this approach, they stop doing things that aren’t useful but were done just because they’ve been doing things that way since 1975.
“EBP eliminates variation and when you do that, you decrease risk and harm,” she adds. “We know what the evidence says and we do the right thing every time. We know using EBP improves patient outcomes by 30 percent,” she says.
Gallagher-Ford may have found her ultimate calling well into her career, but her passion for nursing started at Binghamton University.
Originally a biology major, Gallagher-Ford transferred to the School of Nursing (it wasn’t called Decker at the time) because her mother had been a nurse and she thought she’d give it a try.
“You could say I just wandered into nursing,” she says, “but what really hooked me was when I did my pediatric rotation at Wilson Hospital [now UHS Wilson Medical Center in Johnson City, N.Y.]. I knew pediatrics was for me.”
A lucky accident
There’s another reason Gallagher-Ford has fond memories of Binghamton University. In 1977, her future husband, Jeffrey Ford ’79, MA ’81, walked into her room.
“The school had run out of on-campus housing, so they put a bunch of us into the Colonial Motor Inn across the street. My husband came to visit the guy in the room next to me and he walked into my room by mistake. We met, and the rest is history.
“We’ve had an amazing life together. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. That’s the beginning of my Binghamton story, and if nothing else had ever happened that would have been good enough!”
After graduation, the alumni couple worked in Binghamton for a few years before moving to New Jersey where they had children and built their life for the next two decades — Lynn as a nurse and Jeffrey as a published writer in the fantasy genre. But, Gallagher-Ford says, Binghamton always remained an influential part of her life and she is happy that a fortuitous meeting led to an opportunity to give back to her alma mater.
A chance to help Decker
“I happened to meet Mario Ortiz at an EBP workshop we were doing at his former university, and it turned out he had just accepted the job at Decker as dean! I said to him, ‘When you get there let me know what they’re doing with alumni because I would love to help build a network.’ So he took my card and promised to reach out to me, and he did! I’m excited to bring my passion for all things nursing to help Binghamton increase its prominence. It’s an amazing school that I’m proud of.”
A member of the Decker School of Nursing Advisory Board, Gallagher-Ford is also a clinical associate professor of nursing at Ohio State.
In 2013, she was inducted into the National Academies of Practice and the Nursing Academy as a distinguished practitioner and fellow. In 2017, she became a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing.