Research Awareness for Healthcare Professionals Essay Example

importance.

I then focussed on a specific theme within ‘communication’ that I believed would be relevant to my chosen branch of study of children’s nursing. I finally narrowed my specific search focus to literature relating to children, their experiences of receiving healthcare and how healthcare professionals communicate with them. As a paediatric nursing student I believe this to be a complex, interesting and challenging subject which is relevant to my current learning.

I decided to focus on the experiences of children as I feel it is mportant that – like adults - children have a ‘voice’ and a right to request a healthcare provision that meets their individual needs, I believe therefore that healthcare practitioners would be required to communicate in an appropriate manner to reflect this. I also thought about communication with older children - adolescents of around ages 15 to 18 years – and the issue that children of this age are generally mature enough to be given more detailed information of their health conditions and that communication would also acknowledge that service users of this age may desire more choices and input into the provision of their own care.

I commenced my initial search by utilising the university online resources. From the resources menu I accessed the ‘summon’ search facility, then entered the search term of ‘adolescent communication’. This initial search produced 101,168 results. I then proceeded to refine this search by doing the following: I limited the media to be only articles from scholarly publications and refined by content type to ‘journal article’ in order to obtain results from credible sources. I refined the search by publication date

of 2008 to present to ensure the literature was up-to-date.

I refined by language to only English. Then refined by subject terms by selecting the words ‘adolescents’, ‘teenagers’, ‘care and treatment’, ‘communication’ and ‘nursing’ in order to try to find literature relevant to my requirements. After all of these refinements the search produced 4231 results. This was still far too many results and I felt that the results differed widely in subject and place of origin and I could not find any articles relevant to my search goals on the first page of entries of the results list. The first 25 entries of these results are displayed in a list in appendix 1.

For my second search I focused on making the key words of my search term more applicable for what I hoped to find. I again used the ‘summon’ search facility and entered the search term ‘adolescent health empowerment via communication’. This search produced 4678 results and these results were then refined by publication type to include only journals, and by subject type to include the subjects of ‘children and youth’ and ‘adolescents’, I again refined by publication date of 2008 to present, and to show only English language results.

This then produced a list of 57 results and the first 25 entries of these results are displayed in appendix 2. The more detailed and specific criteria of this search appears to have produced some slightly more successful results than in my first search as I found 2 articles of particular interest that were more relevant to my search requirements; article number 4 in appendix 2: ‘Adolescents Transition to Self-Management

of a Chronic Genetic Disorder’ (2008) by Giarelli, E. , Bernhardt, B. A. , Mack, R. & Pyeritz, R. E, writes of the requirement of “gradual changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour influenced by parents, peers, and health care providers” in order for the successful transition to self-management of a disorder.

Also article number 10: ‘Feasibility and impact of a school-based intervention for families of urban adolescents with asthma: results from a randomized pilot trial’ (2008) by Bruzzese, J. , Unikel, L. , Gallagher, R. , Evans, D. & Colland, V. in appendix 2 does seem somewhat relevant to my search as it was based on a pilot scheme of teaching and supporting teenage asthmatics and their caregivers, in order for the teenagers to become more autonomous and independent in the management of their conditions. After undertaking two searches I felt that I had not yet found a suitable match to my specific search requirements, I therefore decided to attempt searching by using a health specific database, to see if this would be a more efficient method of producing the desired results.

I started by again accessing the University resources site, then selected ‘databases a – z’ from the resources menu. I then selected ‘Nursing & Midwifery’ from the ‘subject areas’ search box, and this produced a list of relevant databases, from this list I selected the database ‘Medline with full text’ as the description stated it contained a comprehensive source of full text medical journals, this appeared to be a useful and relevant database for my particular search.

I then completed a ‘selection options’ page, selecting date of publication as 2008 to

2011 to make sure that the literature was relevant and up-to-date. I selected the options of ‘abstract available’, ‘English language’, ‘human’, then I selected the age related option of ‘adolescent 13-18’, then selected ‘Nursing’ under the journal subset option in order to produce results that are relevant to my profession. This search produced 3237 results of widely varied pieces of literature, which was, gain too many, of the first 25 results some were not at all relevant to my search requirements.

There were however, some that were interesting from a child nursing perspective. The first 25 results can be seen as a list in appendix 3. I did however find this search method more difficult than the previous 2 searches using ‘summon’; there were not as many options to refine the search and I felt the results pages were not as user friendly and I could not export the list into referencing software or save or email a reference list. My next search was conducted on ‘Google’.

I decided to use a well-known public search engine purely to compare what results could be achieved. For this search I entered the term ‘respect and dignity adolescent communication’. This initial search produced 1950000 results, I then selected the option to find ‘Scholarly articles for respect and dignity adolescent communication’ and selected articles since 2008, this still produced far too many results: 11200. I then accessed the ‘advanced scholar search’ option and selected the option to search only ‘medicine, pharmacology and veterinary science’.

This produced 240 results, the first 9 entries of which can be found in appendix 4. These results did not produce any

literature that seemed to fit my requirements, furthermore, the results did not contain an ‘abstract’ with which to gain a general overview of the article, therefore it proved difficult to ascertain what some articles were about. Also, the format of the search result entries was not uniform and therefore it proved difficult to attempt to list these entries in a ‘Harvard reference’ style of format.

For my 5th and final attempt to find a suitable article I again used the online resource ‘summon’ facility. My search term used was again ‘respect and dignity adolescent communication’, as I had used in my previous ‘Google’ search. This search produced 9699 results, which I then refined by selecting content to include ‘books’ and ‘journal article’ and to exclude all other forms of written publication. In the subject terms option I selected inclusion of terms ‘children’, ‘Great Britain’ and ‘nursing’.

I selected the publication date of 2008 to present and selected English language text. This search then produced 3 results. A list of these results can be seen in appendix 5. This search produced the article that I feel I most relevant to my search requirements, this article is number 2 in appendix 5; the article by T Moules (2009), and is entitled "They wouldn’t know how it feels . . . ’: characteristics of quality care from young people’s perspectives: a participatory research project" and it was published in the Journal of Child Health Care.

This article researched the “need to hear from children themselves on the quality of healthcare they receive and, although their views are increasingly sought, little is known about children’s definitions

of ‘high or low quality care’”. The research that was carried out actively involved children in the collection of data from the child participants, showing that much thought had gone into the delivery of research and how to obtain the most credible results that were possible.

I believe this is a relevant piece of literature as it illustrates respect and dignity through communication towards children receiving healthcare and provides children with a voice, to give feedback on the provision of services they have received, in order for healthcare services to meet the needs of children. For this task I completed a total of 5 searches to find a relevant article; I used 2 different search facilities within the University online resources website; ‘Summon’ and ‘Databases A-Z’.

I also accessed the widely used public search engine ‘Google’ in order to compare and contrast any results found against using university resources, On this occasion I think Google did not produce any relevant results, but if using the Google search engine in the future I would always need to question and do further research of any literature found in order to ascertain its credibility and to ensure it as a suitable piece of writing for degree-level study. Summon’ became my preferred search tool as I found it the most user-friendly, with many options for refining of the search, with an easy to read and use options screen, with a results display that allowed the user to very simply save, email and export a list of search results. The results shown also each displayed an option to access an abstract for the entry, therefore providing an easy

and quick piece of guide to the detail of each piece of literature.

This then enabled me to easily verify whether each entry was of interest to my particular search. If I were to undertake a similar search again, I would start by utilising the ‘Summon’ search facility. This resource proved very easy to use, and I believe it produced the most successful results on this occasion. I would focus on the whole theme of my search instead of just focussing on the theme within a theme, for example my first search used the search term “adolescent communication” but did not include the overall theme of respect and dignity.

This proved to be a far too broad a search term, with little success, therefore I have learned that I need to include the whole topic. This can be seen in my final search where my search term of “respect and dignity adolescent communication” proved to produce more relevant and successful results, and furthermore, enabled me to find a relevant article.

I would again refine the search by using options within the summon facility as this facility proved useful and simple to utilise; this again produced interesting and relevant results and filtered out many pieces of literature that were not suitable. I found that the results list generated from the ‘summon’ searches were presented in a format that was very easy to read and understand, and furthermore, the facility of viewing an articles abstract by hovering over a particular article was extremely useful.

Also, if undertaking a similar search I would endeavour to utilise other search resources within the university e-resources website

such as ‘E-books’ or ‘A – Z of E-Journals and E-Books’ as I have not accessed these resources yet and therefore have not ascertained if these resources would be of use for my particular research needs. This search, however, has enabled me to become more confident and proficient in researching skills, so it has proved to be a very productive exercise in providing me with skills that I will use throughout my period of study over the forthcoming 3 years.