CLINICAL RESEARCH PAPER

Clinical Research Paper

Clinical Research Paper

This paper provides a critical analysis and the interpretation of findings of the article titled, “Helping them understand: Nurses caring behaviour as perceived by family members of Trauma patients”. This article was published recently in 2009 in April-June issue of the Journal of Trauma Nursing. This article is written by a team of researchers - Lory Clukey, Janice Hayes, Alison Merrill, Denise Curtis.

Purpose of the Paper

The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe the behaviours that are perceived by the family members of the trauma patients as caring.

Examination of Literature Review

The authors have used Chicago/Turabian style of referencing. Majority of the references have been taken from the studies published during the last 10 years, with one study that is included dates back to 1986. Also the literature review provided by the authors is too short and it should have covered a major portion of the study. May be they would have been restrained by the limitations of time and the sample size chosen for this particular study.

Qualitative researchers have studied professional caregiving and have written extensively about becoming a physician and the doctor-patient relationship. They have documented the uncertainties of medical students, beginning with the initial shock of anatomy dissection, then first surgical procedures, and the first encounters with death. Qualitative researchers have also documented the moral and ethical dilemmas that occur in the practice of medicine and have uncovered the nature of the decisions that physicians make in daily practice. For example, there are a large number of qualitative studies that examine the breaking of bad news. This research, written primarily from the family's perspective, uncovers the harm that may occur to patients and their families when information regarding the prognosis is given insensitively or without consideration that the patients are people. These findings inform practice and instruct nurses how to provide shattering information gently (Clukey, Hayes, Merrill, Curtis, 2009).

There is a parallel literature on becoming a nurse. These studies describe what it is like to be a neophyte nurse; to be a more experienced nurse, yet carry a caseload beyond one's capabilities; or to cope with emergencies that one has not previously encountered. Some of this research gets to the heart of these problems, describing the human side of caring and the developing nurse-patient relationship. Some of this literature is phenomenological, providing insights into the meaning of caring, suffering, and fatigue. Some of this research uses grounded theory, showing how one develops relationships or how one copes with the nuances of nursing, developing mid-range theories. Some of this research uses ethnography, describing, for instance, nurse-patient interaction in the intensive care unit (ICU) when the intubated patient cannot verbalize, and providing clear and concise strategies to enhance communication with these patients. Other research uses narrative inquiry so that nurses may learn from patients' or other nurses' stories about what a certain experience is like, hence informing their own practice (Clukey, Hayes, Merrill, Curtis, ...