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Posts from the ‘Journal Information’ Category

Sep 19

Community-engaged Research: Working Effectively Across Diverse Communities


Our current featured article is titled “Advancing Nursing Science Through Community Advisory Boards: Working Effectively Across Diverse Communities” by Rosa M. Gonzalez-Guarda, PhD, MPH, CPH, RN, FAAN; Emily J. Jones, PhD, RNC-OB; Elizabeth Cohn, PhD, boardRN; Gordon L. Gillespie, PhD, DNP, RN, CEN, CNE, CPEN, PHCNS-BC, FAEN, FAAN; and Felesia Bowen, PhD, DNP, APN.  While this article is featured, you can download it at no cost here.  We welcome your comments and ideas!

Abstract:

The movement toward community-engaged research is well aligned with nursing’s strong tradition of engaging individuals, families, and communities in designing and evaluating nursing care. As such, nurse scientists should consider engaging the recipients of care in the research process. Community advisory boards are a common way in which communities are engaged in research. The purpose of this article is to provide a framework for effectively working with community advisory boards in diverse communities that is informed by evidence and experiences of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Nurse Faculty Scholars. Recommendations can serve as a blueprint for nurse scientists as they engage communities in research promoting health equity.

Sep 14

ANS Collections Updated!


One of the most important challenges for scholars in all disciplines is finding the important classic literature related to your line of scholarship!  This is where the ANS Collections can help!  The Collections provide links to important classic articles that have student-thinking-clipart-mystery_clip_artappeared since the early days of ANS (October 1978) through 2009.  While all scholarship requires familiarity with the most recent literature in your field, it is equally important to know the history of your line of inquiry, and the important background leading up to where you are today.  But discovering this history is a major challenge, since keyword search capabilities for deep searches have changed dramatically in recent years and they do not reach back to the important historical documents.  So in addition to library key word searches, scholars also need to be intimately familiar with the content in journals that publish in your area of expertise.

I encourage you to browse these ANS Collections, organized by topics that appear regularly throughout ANS.  You just might find something you never knew existed, or long ago forgot!  This actually happened to me as I selected the articles for each Collection – articles that I had long ago forgotten suddenly came into a new light!

The Collections will be updated again, once sufficient time has passed to recognize material that stands the test of time! Meanwhile, take a virtual stroll through the Collections and discover what is there to inform you work anew!

Aug 21

2 Comments

A Humanizing Model for Nursing Social Justice Action


The latest featured article from the current issue of ANS is titled “Exercising Nursing Essential and Effective Freedom in Behalf of Social Justice: A Humanizing Model” by Donna J. Perry, PhD, RN; Danny G. Willis, DNS, RN, PMHCNS-BC; Kenneth S. Peterson, PhD, FNP-BC; and Pamela J. Grace, PhD, RN, FAAN. Using powerful personal narratives, the authors provide examples of ways they have broken through barriers, to exercise effective freedom and take specific social justice action within nursing.  Dr. Perry provided this description of their work:

It is increasingly clear that health is dependent upon multiple underlying social factors including environmental conditions, economic status, access to education, employment and a peaceful and participatory society.  These conditions are distributed unequally within our global community.  In this paper we discuss the nursing mandate to act for social justice and the constraints that prevent nursing from realizing this goal.   We argue that nursing has been impeded in addressing underlying socio-political issues that impact health because nursing has historically been positioned within an institutionalized medical paradigm.  We propose a model of nursing essential and effective freedom based on the philosophy of Bernard Lonergan as a framework for addressing barriers to nursing action for social justice.  And we share our personal challenges and strategies for addressing social justice as nurses working in various settings.

 

Jul 31

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The “As-if” World of Nursing Practice: Nurses, Marketing and Decision-Making


We are currently featuring the article titled “The “As-If” World of Nursing Practice: Nurses, Marketing, and Decision-Making” by Quinn Grundy, PhD, RN and Ruth E. Malone, PhD, RN, FAAN. Based on an ethnographic study, the authors conclude that “nursing must deconstruct the “as-if” nondecisional myth by confronting conflicts of interest and owning fully its rightful clinical and advocacy roles.” This article is available to download at no cost while it is featured; I join the authors in inviting you to return here to share your responses and comments!  Dr. Grundy shared this background about her work:

The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, passed as part of the Affordable Care Act, came into effect just at the time I was selecting an area of focus for my PhD dissertation. This legislation required pharmaceutical and medical device companies to publicly report all payments made to physicians and teaching hospitals and issued in a new era of transparency in United States healthcare. What surprised me, however, was that nurses were omitted from the mandate. This caused me to question whether nurses did not have these types of relationships with industry? Or, whether policymakers did not believe they warranted the same level of scrutiny?

Under the supervision of Dr. Ruth Malone, my co-author on this week’s featured article, I conducted an ethnographic investigation into the ways that registered nurses interact with industry in their day-to-day clinical practice at 4 hospitals in the western United States. What we found couldn’t have been more different than what the policy climate suggested.

Often on a daily basis, nurses interacted with industry representatives from multiple medically-related industries including

Quinn Grundy

pharmaceutical, medical device, information technology and infant formula companies. These interactions including attending drug company-sponsored dinners, receiving payments for speaking or consulting, and receiving gifts at conferences or other sponsored events. Among physicians, these types of relationships have been associated with negative changes in prescribing habits including increased prescribing of brand-name, heavily marketed medicines with lower safety profiles.

However, to our surprise, nurses were mystified at the attention of sales representatives and wondered at their inclusion in marketing activities like drug dinners. They explained that as health professionals who cannot prescribe medicines, there was no decision-making for marketing to attempt to sway. Yet, these same nurses described their roles on hospital purchasing committees, narrated multiple instances where they had recommended treatments to providers, and described powerful influence over patient care within the hospital.

This article explores the conditions under which nurses’ considerable influence and power to affect change within clinical practice becomes invisible, even at times to nurses themselves. We call this the “as-if” world of nursing practice — a well-constructed, institutionally-preserved myth that nurses do not make decisions in the absence of doctor’s orders.

We hope this article will stimulate a conversation in the profession about the nature of conflict of interest in nursing practice and the need to recognize, and safeguard, nurses’ considerable decision-making power from marketing influence.

 

Jul 5

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Help for Veterans with PTSD


Our current featured article addresses one of the most pressing health problems for those who have served in military combat – post-traumatic stress disorder.  The article, titled “Efficacy of the Mantram Repetition Program for Insomnia in Veterans With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Naturalistic Study” is authored by Danielle Beck, MPH, CCRC; Lindsay Cosco Holt, PhD, RN; Joseph Burkard, DNSc, CRNA; Taylor Andrews, BA; Lin Liu, PhD; Pia Heppner, PhD and Jill E. Bormann, PhD, RN, FAAN.  The article is available at no cost while it is featured!  The program described in this paper was recently designated as an “Edgerunner” by the American Academy of Nursing.

Dr. Borman shared this message about the article for ANS readers:

As nurses, we embrace a holistic perspective to patient care. In this study, we tested a mind-body-spiritual intervention, repeating a mantram (sacred word), to help manage symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Veterans. A “mantram” has been described as a “spiritual formula for transformation;” a self-selected, spiritually based word or phrase (sometimes called a Holy Name) that reflects all the major spiritual traditions of the world. For a more detailed description, see: The Power of the Mantram or learn about its origins from the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.  Veterans found that this intervention promoted the relaxation response and reduced symptoms of PTSD and insomnia.

Authors of this paper collectively brought expertise from nursing, psychology, public health, and psychiatry. We wanted to capture the “real-world” experience of Veterans seeking care for their symptoms. Here is a brief video with examples and stories from veterans about their experiences:

 

Danielle Beck

Pia Heppner

Joe Burkard

Jill Bormann

Jun 19

1 Comment

Nurses’ Unacknowledged Vulnerability: Burdensome Feelings


We are now featuring the article titled “Exposed to an Accumulation of Burdensome Feelings: Mental Health Nurses’ Vulnerability in Everyday Encounters With Seriously Ill Inpatients”  by Solfrid Vatne, PhD, RN. This article has important implications for practice, and provides insight into the knowledge and wisdom necessary for nursing practice.  The article is available for download at no cost while it is featured!  Here is a message from Dr. Vatne about her work:

Solfrid Vatne

Understanding and developing nursing practice has been my focus for teaching and area of research since the beginning of my career in education of nurses in 1980’s. The theory-practice gap in mental health nursing has been especially intriguing to me. I began questioning the students’ lack of reflection concerning dominating nursing practices, and wondering about how tacit knowledge seemed to oversteer therapeutic ideals in nursing actions such as building trusting relationships with patients.

An example of the theory-practice gap can be found in my master project that described the contradictions between having user cooperation as an ideal for practice and limit-setting actions directed towards controlling patients’ deviant behavior. My PhD-project explored the relationship between tacit and theoretical ideals further through an Action science design, based on a field study with observations, interviews, and reflection-groups, which searched for nurses’ rationality in limit-setting actions. The main finding was that nurses’ rationality was emotionally based and connected to a variation of unpleasant feelings in situations with patients whose behavior was experienced as unforeseen, deviant and sometimes dangerous. The patients experienced limit-setting as tortuous, which in turn could escalate their unforeseen behavior and hinder the nurses reaching their goal of controlling the patients’ behavior.

The possibility that both patients and nurses could be regarded as vulnerable struck me, and I became curious about shedding a new light on my data to try to understand nurses’ vulnerability in their relationships to severely mentally ill patients more deeply. This article suggests that such nurse-patient relationships could be viewed as vulnerable in themselves.

 

 

Jun 12

4 Comments

Social Justice in Nursing Education


We are currently featuring the article byWhitney Thurman, MSN, RN and Megan Pfitzinger-Lippe, PhD, RN titled “Returning to the Profession’s Roots: Social Justice in Nursing Education for the 21st Century.” In this article, the authors build a strong case for redesigning nursing education to incorporate social justice concepts throughout the entire curriculum. The article is available at no cost while it is featured on the ANS website! Here is a message from the authors describing the evolution of their article:

We are honored to have our article selected as an Editor’s Pick. This article is a great example of how doctoral students can collaborate to transform in-class assignments into scholarly publications.

Whitney Thurman RN, MSN is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing (UTSoN) and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Future of Nursing Scholar. Megan Lippe PhD, MSN, RN received her doctorate from

Whitney Thurman

UTSoN in 2016 and is a 2014-2016 Jonas Scholar. During the first semester of the rigorous doctoral program at UTSoN, students complete a philosophy course taught by Dr. Lorraine Walker, a renowned and inspirational researcher and educator. As part of the class curriculum, students write a short paper about social justice in nursing. When Megan took the course, she explored the issue of social justice content integration within nursing programs. She subsequently presented a poster on this topic at a local nursing conference and hung the poster in the hallway of the nursing building to highlight her work. Several semesters later

Megan Pfitzinger-Lippe

Whitney began the doctoral program. Having been intrigued by the poster as she walked past it countless times, Whitney approached Megan to ask about her findings. Through a series of conversations, they discovered their similar passions and interests regarding the importance of social justice in nursing education. Instead of starting from scratch for her assignment, Whitney received permission from Dr. Walker to build on Megan’s original idea in order to expand and refine it into a manuscript for publication. Whitney took the original paper and added both a historical perspective and a public health lens to the work. After receiving a grade for the assignment from Dr.

Walker, Whitney and Megan continued to collaborate on revisions until it was ready for submission to ANS. This collaboration was an excellent learning experience and reinforced the idea that careful planning can result in class assignments that are readily transformed into manuscripts suitable for publication.

 

Jun 2

2 Comments

Difficult Nurse-Patient Encounters


Our new featured article is titled “A Qualitative Study of Difficult Nurse-Patient Encounters in Home Health Care” by Mary Kate Falkenstrom, PhD, RN, AOCN. Visit the ANS website to download this article at no charge while it is featured, and return here to share you comments and feedback!  Here is Dr. Falkenstrom’s message about her work:

It is wonderful to have an article published in ANS and for the article to be featured in the Editor’s Picks. This is the first article to be published from the data. I am forever grateful to the nurses who participated in the study and shared their experiences. I am also grateful to the nurses and organizational leaders who were willing to share the study

Mary Kate Falkenstrom

invitation with others. Their support of nursing scholarship provided access to a diverse sample of registered nurses from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. I have the utmost respect for nurses in all practice settings but especially for nurses who practice autonomously outside the walls of traditional healthcare facilities.

As an advanced practice nurse and administrator, I had the privilege to work with highly competent, compassionate, and dedicated home healthcare clinicians for over 17 years. Their level of professionalism was validated by patients and caregivers in letters, patient satisfaction surveys, and comments shared during phone and face-to-face encounters. But, incidents did occur where patients and caregivers would communicate dissatisfaction with a clinician. These encounters were described to me by the clinicians as being associated with intense anger, excessive expectations, and lack of understanding of limitations in the home healthcare setting. Strategies that were effective in defusing anger or negativity in other encounters were reported as not effective in these types of encounters. My concern for clinician safety in the field and the potential that an unwitnessed encounter could have serious performance implications for a nurse-employee led to a focus of research on patient encounters. As more and more volatile encounters are spotlighted in the media, healthcare as well as other industries will need to explore the human-to-human encounter and propose research-derived strategies that individuals can use to manage non-constructive and destructive encounters.

Thank you for taking the time to read the article. I hope the content is of value to your practice—Mary Kate Falkenstrom

May 24

Understanding Health Experience of Preterm Mothers


Our currnet featured article is title “Exploring Preterm Mothers’ Personal Narratives: Influences and Meanings” by Cherie S. Adkins, PhD, RN and Kim K. Doheny, PhD, NNP-BC.  This is an exemplary project focusing on caring in the human health experience, encompassing nursing’s dedication to a wholistic view of that experience.  Visit the ANS website while this article is featured to download the article at no cost!  Here is a message hat Dr. Adkins provided for ANS blog readers!

Cherie Adkins

On behalf of my co-author, Dr. Kim Doheny, and myself it is a true honor to have our article featured in the “Editor’s Picks” section on the Advances in Nursing Science website.  This article is based on my dissertation research completed as a PhD student in nursing at Penn State University.  While a doctoral student I had the privilege of working with Dr. Doheny (a neonatal nurse practitioner and biobehavioral scientist) as her graduate research assistant.  Even though my previous nursing experience included obstetrics, it was while working with Dr. Doheny that I came to more deeply understand preterm infants’ physiologic vulnerabilities and the care provided for them in the NICU.  As I grew increasingly familiar with the preterm world and the associated scientific literature, I began to wonder about the influence of a preterm birth on those most likely to care for these infants into early childhood and beyond, namely their mothers.  At the time there

Kim Doheny

was a dearth of research designed from the perspective of preterm mothers themselves; this gap inspired me to conduct the narrative inquiry study reported in this article.  I trust the lingering effect on those who read this article is that each mother of a former preterm infant has a unique, meaning-filled narrative about her mothering experience that needs to be heard and understood.

May 18

Standing Up for Science


Advances in Nursing Science, along with a host of other scholarly journals world-wide, standing for the crucial activities of science that establish what we can rely on as fact, and based on that assurance, shape wise action. But there is a now a political and cultural wave of mis-information that serves to discredit science, and to sow seeds of doubt that undermines the value of scientific credibility. In my Editorial that appears in the current issue of ANS, I address this challenge and implore all ANS readers to engage in actions to do what is needed to stand for science in all aspects of your professional and personal life.

There are two levels that I address in this editorial – the first is the substantive practices of ANS that assure readers of the credibility and authenticity of the content we publish in the journal.  In particular, we provide clear descriptions of all of our editorial practices in the “Information for Authors,” we hold membership in COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), and we adhere to these standards and practices.

The second issue concerns what each individual, particularly those of us who engage in scholarly activities, must do to stand for the credibility of both the products and the processes of science:

  • Be aware of the best editorial practices of nursing journals that ensure the integrity of their content.
  • Learn and practice “journal due diligence” when you are seeking a journal for publication of your work.
  • Be aware of the dangers of predatory publishers. (See articles published in Nurse and Editor)
  • Ensure that your practices as a scholar are well founded and maintain a record of your practices to ensure that your work is not compromised.
  • Educate others (your patients, students, and colleagues) about your own practices to ensure the integrity of your own work and why these practices are important.
  • Network with other scholars in your area of interest to ensure that you have a community of those who share your intent to maintain the integrity of the scholarship in your field, and who can speak with confidence about the foundation on which your work is based.

This editorial is available on the ANS website at no cost while this issue is the current issue!  Visit the website now to download your copy. Cut and paste or post the list of things to do where you can be reminded every day of how crucial our actions are in this time of challenge!

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