Preceptorship was first promoted as part of the Project 2000 reforms, and evidence suggests it remains valuable to newly qualified nurses. Although there is a lack of research of its effect on patient care, what research there is highlights various positive aspects of preceptorship programmes for newly qualified nurses, preceptors, and organisations. This article summarises the results of a scoping review of the literature, published since 2009, on preceptorship. It also describes a preceptorship initiative in London led by Health Education England.
An integrative literature review of psychosocial factors in the transition to parenthood following non-donor-assisted reproduction compared with spontaneously conceiving couples. Human Fertility. pp. 1-18.
While poor communication between service users and front line staff causes many service user complaints in the British National Health Service (NHS), staff rarely reflect on the causes of these complaints. We discuss findings from an action research project with midwives which suggest that the midwives struggled to fully understand complaints from women, their partners and families particularly about restricted visiting and the locked door to the midwifery unit. They responded to individual requests to visit out of hours while maintaining the general policy of restricted visiting. In this way the door was a gatekeeping device which allowed access to the unit within certain rules. The locked door remained a barrier to women and their families and as a result was a common source of informal complaints. We argue that the locked door and restricted visiting to the midwifery unit were forms of gate-keeping and boundary making by midwives which reveals a tension between their espoused woman-centred care and contemporary midwifery practice which is increasingly constrained by institutional values.
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IntroductionEvidence suggests that poor communication is a key factor which contributes to service user dissatisfaction and complaints in the UK (The Information Centre for Health and Social Care, 2011, 2012, 2013, and internationally (Montini et al., 2008) means that women and their families should be at the heart of everything midwives do in practice. They should be given choice in place of birth, caregiver and care, and be given control over their own care and experience (Page 2003: 33). This philosophical 3 approach to care has emerged in the context of a broader agenda in health towards power-sharing with patients and families (Hogg 1999).However, woman-centred care is a contested concept which is enacted in everyday practice in organisations which may constrain such aspirations towards woman-centred practices (Leap 2009). It is also the case that midwives, although experts in normal childbirth, work in contexts that are framed by discourses of risk, with fear of litigation dominating (Mackenzie Bryers & van Teijlingen 2010). This may add to tensions between practice ideals and reality and lead to ambiguity and defensive practice women's reproductive care. In this paper we develop these ideas on boundary work and routines to discuss what meaning complaints have for midwives and how they respond to informal complaints in a midwifery unit. We draw on findings from an action research (AR) study 1 into informal complaints management in a midwifery unit in one NationalHealth Service (NHS) hospital trust in the UK. The aim of the project was to work with staff to explore their responses to informal complaints which they had identified as a challenging and stressful part of their work. Using findings from the (AR) project, we suggest that midwives struggled to understand women and their families' complaints 1 Responding Effectively to Service users' and Practitioners' perspectives ON care concerns: challenging Susta...
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