Movement and Mobility
Our current featured article is titled “Movement and Mobility: A Concept Analysis” authored by Elizabeth Moulton, MSc; Rosemary Wilson, PhD; and Kevin Deluzio, PhD. These concepts seem simple on the surface, even though both are integral to a large proportion of nursing care, they are often taken for granted. But as this article shows, they are far from simple, and are vital to a person’s health and well-being. We welcome your comments and responses to this article – you can download it at no cost while it is featured, and then return here to share your comments!
Here is a message Elizabeth Moulton shared about this work:
When I began my PhD studies I knew that I was interested in how people moved and how this affected their overall mobility. I had worked for several years in a lab where we measured human movement with sub-millimetre accuracy. Yet, as I sat down to write my thesis proposal, I found that I was unsatisfied with how the terms movement and mobility were used in the literature. They were often used interchangeably and their relationship with one another was unclear.
This concept analysis was written as the first part of my PhD thesis. While writing it, I had the chance to go back to the fundamental definitions and explanations of movement that were introduced in high school Physics. Mrs. Jones’s clear explanation of how we know something is moving was the first thing to come to mind when establishing the defining attributes of movement. I expanded as the project progressed to encompass definitions found in the literature and my clinical experience as a nurse. These concepts were linked to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health to align them with an already well-established framework.
This concept analysis is the basis of all future works for my thesis. It has been used to assess tools that claim to measure movement and/or mobility in a scoping review and has been used in a paper that explores the operationalization of the concepts from theoretical definitions to definitions that can be used to establish measures for clinical and research purposes.
I’m delighted to share this concept analysis that has been fundamental to the progression of my research and hope that others will be able to benefit from it.
ANS: Advances in Nursing Science Blog 