Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘mental health’

Oct 24

Current Nursing Continuing Professional Development (NCPD) Article from ANS!


Each issue of ANS features an article that has been approved for NCPD credit, with the online text accessible from the ANS Web page for the article.

The article in Volume 47:3 is titled Compassionate Care for Parents Experiencing Miscarriage in the Emergency Department: A Situation-Specific Theory, authored by Tina Emond, PhD, RN; Francine de Montigny, PhD, RN; Jessica Webster, MN, RN, PNC(C); Sabrina Zeghiche, PhD; and Mylène Bossé, RN. Here are the author’s statements of significance for this article! Visit the ANS web page for this article, and click the “CE Test” button!

Abstract

In many countries, parents experiencing miscarriage seek treatment in the emergency department (ED). Parents frequently report dissatisfaction with ED care, while nurses report not knowing how to provide optimal care. This article describes the development of a situation-specific theory, Compassionate care for parents experiencing miscarriage in the ED, based on 4 concepts (change trigger, transition properties, conditions of change, and interventions). This theory evolved from a comprehensive review of the literature, 2 empirical studies, Transitions Theory, and collaborative efforts of an experienced team. The detailed theory development process facilitates its integration in practice and supports new theory development.

What is known or assumed to be true about this topic?

In a context where parents are often dissatisfied with the care they receive when they visit the ED for miscarriage, and where nurses feel ill-equipped to provide them with quality care, there is an explicit need to develop theories to guide nursing care through these tenuous experiences.

What this article adds:

This article provides a new situation-specific theory related to miscarriage care at the ED with a humanistic approach that can be used by nurses and other ED health professionals to improve miscarriage care. This theory will also guide other researchers seeking to develop other situation-specific theories.

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.