Aims and objectives. To examine registered nurses’ decision‐making when documenting care in patients’ progress notes.
Background. What constitutes effective nursing documentation is supported by available guidelines. However, ineffective documentation continues to be cited as a major cause of adverse events for patients. Decision‐making in clinical practice is a complex process. To make an effective decision, the decision‐maker must be situationally aware. The concept of situation awareness and its implications for making safe decisions has been examined extensively in air safety and more recently is being applied to health.
Design and methods. The study was situated in a naturalistic paradigm. Purposive sampling was used to recruit 17 registered nurses who used think‐aloud research methods when making decisions about documenting information in patients’ progress notes. Follow‐up interviews were conducted to validate interpretations. Data were analysed systematically for evidence of cues that demonstrated situation awareness as nurses made decisions about documentation.
Results. Three distinct decision‐making scenarios were illuminated from the analysis: the newly admitted patient, the patient whose condition was as expected and the discharging patient. Nurses used mental models for decision‐making in documenting in progress notes, and the cues nurses used to direct their assessment of patients’ needs demonstrated situation awareness at different levels.
Conclusions. Nurses demonstrate situation awareness at different levels in their decision‐making processes. While situation awareness is important, it is also important to use an appropriate decision‐making framework. Cognitive continuum theory is suggested as a decision‐making model that could support situation awareness when nurses made decisions about documenting patient care.
Relevance to clinical practice. Because nurses are key decision‐makers, it is imperative that effective decisions are made that translate into safe clinical care. Including situation awareness training, combined with employing cognitive continuum theory as a decision‐making framework, provides a powerful means of guiding nurses’ decision‐making.
The current health service response to women's domestic violence related health issues seeks to categorise their presenting symptoms into physical and psychological ailments This gives a narrow and somewhat simplistic focus to what is a complex phenomenon and may obscure women's experiences and limit the opportunities to provide proactive health care. The purpose of this study was to expand knowledge about the health issues of women who are subjected to domestic violence, by affording primacy to women's accounts of health, in order to problematise current services and establish a more woman-centered underpinning for healthcare. The study involved narrative analysis of nine interviews with women who spoke about their health and health issues while they lived with domestic violence. Findings revealed that health was complex, and that health issues were not adequately addressed by health services, in fact health care responses were implicated in further adversely affecting the health of participants. These findings illuminate patterns that underlie individual realities of health and give a foundation from which current services can be evaluated and further developed in ways that may be more sensitive to women's realities and needs.
Student-led interprofessional health clinics offer valuable opportunities for student learning and meeting the health care needs of the community. This case study describes the operation of a new interprofessional student-led community health service over its initial 13-month period of operation. This case study also presents an overview of the service provision, student placement opportunities and focuses on the challenges associated with the service and the impact on future planning.
What is known about the topic?Interprofessional student-led clinics offer an opportunity to meet clinical placement demands and interprofessional training needs while also providing a community service.
What does this paper add?This case study adds to the limited literature around knowledge of service delivery and challenges in the operation of community-based student-led interprofessional health services; future planning to streamline processes is also addressed.
What are the implications?There may be relevance to other university–industry partnerships that intend to explore student-led interprofessional service operations designed to address placement shortages, student training and community needs.
The purpose of this article is to describe the Nominal Group Technique and its application as a consensus-generating approach in nursing research. The approach incorporates face-to-face meetings to explore opinions, generate ideas, and determine priorities. The nominal group technique process, which is based on a study designed to develop a nursing student clinical placement (clinical practicum) evaluation tool, is described. Advantages of the approach include creative face-to-face discussions with minimal resource demands. The nominal group technique is beneficial and can be used to achieve consensus in nursing research, but a lack of anonymity may preclude the process in some investigations.
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J Nurs Educ
. 2020;59(2):65–67.]
Despite the overwhelming acknowledgment by health professionals that intimate partner violence is a health issue for women, the present health care response is inadequate to meet women's needs, according to Stark, in the Source Book on Violence Against Women (2001). This article examines through a postmodern lens the health care response. The dominant discourses in the literature indicate that health professionals lack knowledge about intimate partner violence, have attitudes and values that inhibit an effective response, and have no time to respond to these women. To date, strategies to improve the health care response have been limited in effectiveness as structural constraints of the health service and models of practice employed have not been addressed.
The pilot trial showed that the novel technologies were at least as effective as the present method of a polyurethane dressing for dressing and securement of arterial catheters, and may be cost effective. The trial also provided evidence that a larger, multicentre trial would be feasible.
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