Nursing Inquiry (nursing + inquiry)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


From ,part of,' to ,partnership': the changing relationship between nurse education and the National Health Service

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 3 2010
Karen Gillett
GILLETT K,. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 197,207 From ,part of,' to ,partnership': the changing relationship between nurse education and the National Health Service Worldwide, many countries have moved towards incorporating nurse education into the higher education sector and this inevitably has implications for the relationship between nurse education providers and local health service providers. This study explores the changes to the relationship in the UK between nurse education providers and the UK National Health Service over the past 20 years and demonstrates how two political ideologies have been central to those changes. The two ideologies of interest are the introduction of internal markets to the National Health Service by the Conservative government at the end of the 1980s and the New Labour response to the fragmentation of public services caused by Conservative neoliberal policy, which was to introduce the notion of ,partnership working'. This study reviews the wider debate around partnership policy and applies that debate to evaluate the way that nurse education providers and the National Health Service are working in partnership to provide clinical practice placements for nursing students. [source]


Continuing nursing education policy in China and its impact on health equity

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 3 2010
Lily Dongxia Xiao
XIAO LD. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 208,220 Continuing nursing education policy in China and its impact on health equity The aim of this study was to evaluate the mandatory continuing nursing education (MCNE) policy in China and to examine whether or not the policy addresses health equity. MCNE was instituted in 1996 in China to support healthcare reform was to include producing greater equity in health-care. However, the literature increasingly reports inequity in participation in MCNE, which is likely to have had a detrimental effect on the pre-existing discrepancies of education in the nursing workforce, and thereby failing to really address health equity. Despite a growing appeal for change, there is lack of critical reflection on the issues of MCNE policy. Critical ethnography underpinned by Habermas' Communicative Action Theory and Giddens' Structuration Theory were used to guide this study. Findings are presented in four themes: (i) inaccessibility of learning programs for nurses; (ii) undervaluation of workplace-based learning; (iii) inequality of the allocation of resources; and (iv) demands for additional support in MCNE from non-tertiary hospitals. The findings strongly suggest the need for an MCNE policy review based on rational consensus with stakeholders while reflecting the principles of health equity. [source]


The Inuulitsivik Maternities: culturally appropriate midwifery and epistemological accommodation

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 2 2010
Vasiliki K Douglas
DOUGLAS VK. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 111,117 The Inuulitsivik Maternities: culturally appropriate midwifery and epistemological accommodation This is a literature-based historical analysis that uses Michel Foucault's technique of tracing epistemological change over time to understand the epistemological changes and their outcomes that have occurred in Nunavik, the Inuit region of Northern Quebec, with the introduction of modern techniques and technology of childbirth in the period after the Second World War. Beginning in 1986, in the village of Puvurnituq, a series of community birthing centres known as the Inuulitsivik Maternities have been created. They incorporate biomedical techniques and technology, but are incorporated into the Inuit epistemology of health, in which the community is the final arbitrator of medical authority. This epistemological accommodation between modern biomedicine and the distinctly premodern Inuit epistemology of health has led to the creation of a new and profoundly non-modern approach to childbirth in Nunavik. [source]


The world's first secular autonomous nursing school against the power of the churches

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 2 2010
Michel Nadot
NADOT M. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 118,127 The world's first secular autonomous nursing school against the power of the churches Secular healthcare practices were standardized well before the churches' established their influence over the nursing profession. Indeed, such practices, resting on the tripartite axiom of domus, familia, hominem, were already established in hospitals during the middle ages. It was not until the last third of the eighteenth century that the Catholic Church imposed its culture on secular health institutions; the Protestant church followed suit in 1836. In reaction to the encroachment of religious orders on civil society and the amalgam of religious denominations favored, for example, by the devout Florence Nightingale (supported, in 1854, by Sir Sidney Herbert, the influential Puseyite), it is on 20 July 1859 that the great Swiss nineteenth century pedagogue and recipient of the Académie française Gold Medal, Valérie de Gasparin-Boissier (1813,94), proposed a model of secular healthcare training for nurses that would become a counter-model set in opposition to religious health institutions. Forerunner of later schools, the world's first secular autonomous Nursing School was founded in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its mission was to bring decisive changes to the statutes of nurses' training, which were then still based on six principles not far removed from those of religious communities at the time: commitment for life, the Rule of St Augustine, obedience, celibacy, the renouncement of salary, and the uniform. [source]


The textual organization of placement into long-term care: issues for older adults with mental illness

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 1 2010
Annette Lane
LANE A, McCOY L and EWASHEN C. Nursing Inquiry 2010: 17: 3,14 The textual organization of placement into long-term care: issues for older adults with mental illness Arranging placement of older adults from hospital mental health units into nursing homes or assisted living facilities can be difficult and protracted. The difficulty in placing these individuals is often attributed to stigma; that is, personnel in nursing homes are reluctant to accept mentally ill older adults because of the fear of mental illness and violence. Using an institutional ethnographic approach, we argue the importance of exploring how nursing home access is organized, especially the institutional process of placement. Our study, examining the process of placing older adults from mental health units into nursing homes or assisted living facilities within a western Canadian city, reveals how three specific textual points within the institutional process of placement do not work well for older adults with mental illness. These textual points include: constructing the older adult as a ,placeable' person, the first-level match and the second-level match. After exploring why the three specific points in the process do not work well for mentally ill individuals, we reconsider the explanation of stigma, and then suggest implications for change. [source]


Power in telephone-advice nursing

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 1 2010
Vesa Leppänen
LEPPÄNEN V. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 15,26 Power in telephone-advice nursing Power is a central aspect of nursing, especially in telephone-advice nursing, where nurses assess callers' medical problems and decide what measures that need to be taken. This article presents a framework for understanding how power operates in social interaction between nurses and callers in telephone-advice nursing in primary care in Sweden. Power is analysed as the result of nurses and callers being oriented to five social structures that are relevant to their actions in this context, namely the organization of telephone-advice nursing, the social stock of medical knowledge, the professional division of labour between nurses and doctors, structures of social interaction and structures of emotions. While structural constraints govern some actions to a high degree, calls take place in an organizational free room that give nurses more leeway for acting more creatively. The discussion focuses on the introduction of new technologies of control, for instance computerized decision support systems and audio recording of calls, and on how they reduce the free room. Empirical data consist of 276 audio-recorded telephone calls to 13 nurses at six primary-care centres and of qualitative interviews with 18 nurses. [source]


Shape-shifting discourses of anorexia nervosa: reconstituting psychopathology

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 4 2003
Pamela K. Hardin
HARDIN PK. Nursing Inquiry 2003; 10: 209,217 Shape-shifting discourses of anorexia nervosa: reconstituting psychopathology This article explores how the circuitous relationship between individuals, the media, and discursive systems replicate and reinforce the act of self-starvation in young women. Using a feminist poststructuralist methodology, the focus of this article is on how discourses and institutional practices operate to position young women who take up the subject position of wanting to be diagnosed as anorexic. Utilizing data from online accounts and individual interviews, I attend to the ways in which young women are institutionally positioned as ,anorexics' and the effects that those positions have on their behaviors, in addition to reinforcing institutional practices that construct anorexia nervosa. Questions addressed through this inquiry are: How do institutional practices create and continue to constitute ,anorexia nervosa'? How do discourses operate to position young women such that they are either included and/or excluded into the category of ,anorexia nervosa'? What are the effects and consequences that emanate from these positionings? [source]


Implementing evidence-based nursing practice: a tale of two intrapartum nursing units

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 4 2003
Jan Angus
ANGUS J, HODNETT E and O'BRIEN-PALLAS L. Nursing Inquiry 2003; 10: 218,228 Implementing evidence-based nursing practice: a tale of two intrapartum nursing units Despite concerns that the rise of evidence-based practice threatens to transform nursing practice into a performative exercise disciplined by scientific knowledge, others have found that scientific knowledge is by no means the preeminent source of knowledge within the dynamic settings of health-care. We argue that the contexts within which evidence-based innovations are implemented are as influential in the outcomes as the individual practitioners who attempt these changes. A focused ethnography was done in follow-up to an earlier trial that evaluated the effectiveness of a marketing strategy to encourage the adoption of evidence-based intrapartum nursing practice. Bourdieu's (1990, 1991) concepts of habitus, capital and social field were used in our refinement of the analysis of the ethnographic findings. Nursing leadership, interprofessional struggle with physicians, the characteristics of the community and the physical environment were prominent issues at all of the sites. Detailed descriptions of the sociohistorical context and of the experiences at two sites are presented to illustrate the complexities encountered when implementing innovations. [source]


Chinese values, health and nursing

JOURNAL OF ADVANCED NURSING, Issue 2 2001
Yu-chih Chen PhD RN
Chinese values, health and nursing Purpose.,To describe the roots of Chinese values, beliefs and the concept of health, and to illustrate how these ways have influenced the development of health care and nursing among Chinese in the Republic of China (ROC) and the People's Republic of China (PRC). Scope.,Based on the literature and direct observation in the PRC and ROC, this is an introduction to Chinese philosophies, religion, basic beliefs, and values with a special meaning for health and nursing. Chinese philosophies and religion include Confucian principles, Taoism, theory of ,Yin' and ,Yang', and Buddhism. Beliefs and values include the way of education, practice of acupuncture, herbal treatments and diet therapy. How people value traditional Chinese medicine in combination with western science, and the future direction of nursing and nursing inquiry are also briefly addressed. Conclusion.,Chinese philosophies and religions strongly influence the Chinese way of living and thinking about health and health care. Nurses must combine information about culture with clinical assessment of the patient to provide cultural sensitive care. A better way may be to combine both western and Chinese values into the Chinese health care system by negotiating between the traditional values while at the same time, respecting an individual's choice. The foundation of China's philosophical and aesthetic tradition, in combination with western science is important to the future advancement of nursing research that will be beneficial to the Republics, Asia, and the world. [source]