A Qualitative Study on the Role of Patient, Essay Example

The goal of this research study was to identify the impact of patient-nurse communication in acute cardiac care. Although researchers currently understand that communication is important in the healthcare setting, they wants to determine how this specifically pertains to cardiology. Ultimately, identifying these gaps in knowledge will allow researchers to understand how to improve communication, which may also improve clinical care. This study is significant because many patients suffer from myocardial infarction on a yearly basis, and it is necessary to determine how care can be modified to better assist these patients.

The researchers evaluated communication skills based on three properties, naive reading, structural analysis, and critical interpretation skills. Therefore, a major question being considered was whether the nurses and patients lacked these skills or whether they were adequate enough to support patient care. In this manner, the purpose and research questions were related to the problem. Qualitative methods were appropriate to answer the research question because the interactions between nurses and patients were observed and narrative interviews were issued. The researchers therefore needed to decide how to decipher these interactions based on coding the information that was contained within them. Although the information could potentially be coded into quantitative values, the produced results wouldn’t be as valuable as marking the generally efficacy of the communication between the patient and nurse and noting why this was the case.

The authors cited both quantitative and qualitative studies relevant to the focus of this study. In addition, systematic reviews that discussed both quantitative and qualitative studies were included. Many of the references that were used were not current. Some of the quantitative studies are older than the 5-year limit, although they do not surpass this limit by more than a few years. All of the qualitative studies appear recent enough to be relevant to the information presented in this publication. The author indicates the weakness of the available studies, but does not do so thoroughly. The author does indicate why this study is weak in the discussion section, and proposes different studies that could be performed in the future to strengthen the knowledge of this relationship. The literature review did not do an effective job in building a logical argument, although individuals who are already familiar with this field of research would be able to recognize the knowledge gaps that the authors are discussing. Ultimately, this should have been stated more apparently so that researchers in other fields would be able to gain a greater understanding of the information presented.

The author failed to identify a specific perspective from which the study was developed, although background information was provided. Since this appears to not be a frequently studied topic, it is possible that the perspective being studied does not have a formal name. A framework was not developed from the study findings. It appears that this study was preliminary, to determine if it would be worthwhile to conduct a larger scale study using more than 10 patient-nurse interactions. The results confirmed that many nurses were able to facilitate patient care by establishing non-verbal and verbal communication, which allowed them to gain the trust of their patients. Furthermore, patients preferred it when the patient-centered perspective was used. However, more research will have to be done on this topic to ensure that the findings can be utilized in practice, due to the small sample size used.

References

Burns, N., & Grove, S. (2011). Understanding Nursing Research (5th ed.). Elsevier. ISBN-13: 9781437707502

Liljeroos M, Snellman IM, Ekstedt MH. (2011). A qualitative study on the role of patient–nurse  communication in acute cardiac care. Retrieved from  http://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/jnep/article/view/332/285