A CRITICAL APPRAISAL ARTICLE

A Critical appraisal Article

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A Critical appraisal Article

Introduction

The article chosen for critical appraisal is given by Hilary Brown, Bridget Johnston & Ulrika Ostlund (2011) with the title “Identifying care actions to conserve dignity in end-of-life care.” Critical appraisal can be defined as the ability to appraise a research paper particularly in a critical manner, and this is considered as an important skill for the professional nurses to learn and implement (LoBiondo & Haber, 2013). The purpose of critical appraisal is to develop the ability to judge the quality of the research paper, recognize the element of bias present, understand the methodology and suggest that the conclusion is measurable, achievable and the intervention if any is cost effective. It is important to understand that critical appraisal is a systematic process which is used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of research article, and the purpose behind this is to assess the usefulness of the article and whether the results are validated or not. The most important critical appraisal tool is the evaluation of the study designs that whether the right kind of study design is opted for to develop a relationship between the exposure and outcome of the study. It is also important to consider the relationship between the research questions and the methodology of the research. Other factors which also need consideration are statistical analysis, data interpretations, conflict of interest and the relevance of the research topic to the applied field of interest (LoBiondo & Haber, 2013). The aim for critical appraisal is to assist the healthcare providers in identifying the most appropriate, relevant and high quality researches available, and use them for the evidence based practice (Limon, 2001, p. 357).

Critical Appraisal And Nursing Practices

Critical appraisal skills and nursing practices go side by side when it comes to reading and understanding the research articles. It is important for nurse to learn how to appraise the research article related to patient care, patient treatment and evidence based interventions. The use of critical appraisal will help them to integrate the evidence based practice extracted through high quality research and implement into clinical decision making process for better patient care (Sandelowski, 2000, p. 334).A poor conducted research will always lead to poor results, and this type of research has no place in the nursing practices. The achievement of the best nursing practices must be measured on the evidence proved by the research; rather they follow the expert's opinions or evidences alone (LoBiondo & Haber, 2013).

Discussion

The selected study is a qualitative descriptive research in which focus groups or the research subjects were used for data collection. The data collection tool was focus group interviews as multiple perceptions of the stakeholder were kept in consideration. The literature review was also conducted to determine the focus groups in the palliative care settings. The interviews were based on semi structure questions which covered all the themes in the Chochinov model of dignity, used as predefined framework for data analysis.

Study Design

The critical appraisal tool which ...