Search

Nursing is frequently described as a caring practice. What this concept means may be less clear. This paper considers nursing as a caring practice in three steps. First, the concept of practice based on Taylor's and MacIntyre's philosophical definitions of the term is described. Secondly, numerous notions of caring are presented; the call from some nurse researchers for quantification of the concept and why this is problematic is discussed; and an exposition of caring from a phenomenological perspective is provided. Finally, the notions of practice and caring are joined, and the concept of a caring practice is presented. Nursing as a public caring practice is illustrated with examples from an interpretive phenomenological study. In conclusion, it is claimed that a phenomenological view of caring combined with a comprehensive definition of practice is well suited to nursing, and allows for a description of nurses’ caring practices from both a nursing and patient perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluation of various methods in clinical practice is often based on interpretations by two or more observers. Such data need to be analysed with correct statistics, or the results and conclusions may be misleading. In this study, the use of measures of agreement for ordinal data in five international nursing journals is reviewed and various methods for measuring agreement are presented and discussed. Analyses of agreement did not seem to be very common in nursing research, but a great variation was found regarding the choice of method for analysing agreement. Both acceptable and unacceptable methods were found in the articles reviewed. When choosing among various methods for agreement the weighted κ-coefficient is probably the most useful for ordinal data, but several issues of concern arise and need to be taken into consideration when using these types of analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scand J Caring Sci; 2005; 19; 128–139Applicability of the Nursing Interventions Classification to describe nursingThe aim of this survey was to test the applicability of the Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) system for use in a future nursing information system for documenting nursing in an electronic patient record in Iceland. Also, the aim was to test the translation of NIC into Icelandic. In order to be applicable to nursing NIC needs to be sensitive enough to describe the work nurses do, differentiate between specialities in nursing, and be understandable to nurses. A sample of 198 nurses was asked to identify how often they used each of 433 NIC nursing interventions. Of the 36 most frequently used interventions half are within the physiological domain. Core nursing interventions were different between specialities, e.g. Analgesic Administration had a high mean score in surgical nursing, and Health Education in primary health care.anovafor the 27 classes in NIC showed significant differences (p < 0.01) by all nursing specialities except one, Crisis Management. A Tukeypost hoctest showed how nursing specialities were reflected differently in the NIC domains, e.g. medical/surgical nursing in the Physiological: Basic Domain, but psychiatric nursing in the Behavioural Domain. Factor analysis of classes in NIC show good resemblance with the domains in NIC and the structure of the classification is strongly supported, except the Safety Domain. The results from this study indicate that nurses in the sample consider NIC to be applicable to describe nursing. The language is a powerful tool and is central in reflecting nursing practice as well as supporting the construct of knowledge. The translation of NIC to Icelandic is one step in many in preparing nurses to use a standardized language which can also be used in an electronic patient record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scand J Caring Sci; 2004; 18; 410–416Staff's experience of and the management of violent incidents in elderly careViolence towards staff has become an important issue, since it has been reported to be common in various health care settings. This study aimed to describe emotional reactions among staff being exposed to violence in residential community care for the elderly: to investigate consequences from violent incidents and to describe the management of violent incidents. Data were collected by telephone interviews with nursing staff reporting incidents of violence. During the period of investigation, 97 of 848 staff (11.4%) reported that they had been exposed to violence. More than one-third of them reported subsequent wound and bruises from the incident and two of the exposed staff consulted a doctor because of the violent incident. The most frequently reported reactions among the staff were aggression, astonishment, and antipathy against the perpetrating care recipient, as well as insufficiency, powerlessness, insult and fear. A majority of the incidents were judged as intentionally perpetuating from the care recipient. Most of the violent incidents were managed by informal discussions in the working team. A low number of the reported incidents of violence involved formal discussions with nurse managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]