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Background: Simulation‐based education (SBE) is crucial to prepare nursing students prior to their clinical learning experience. Theory‐based simulation learning is increasingly important for analysing how students learn. This study describes and analyses how nursing students learn through simulation in the context of palliative care communication under a socio‐material approach and explores the transfer of their knowledge and skills from simulation to clinical practice. Methods: Twenty‐seven final‐year nursing students in six groups participated in two simulated scenarios, followed by a debriefing and post‐clinical focus groups to capture their reflections and learning. Fourteen of them joined the post‐clinical focus groups after completing their clinical placements. Video recordings of the simulation, and the audio recordings from the debriefing, and post‐clinical focus groups were transcribed and coded based on the human and non‐human elements that were observed. These were triangulated with data collected through team participant observations, an analysis of the existing syllabi and curriculum, and a participant mapping exercise after the simulation. These various data sources illustrate how student learning and reflections took place. Results: The three themes of student learning derived from the results and analysis were (1) students' expanded learning of health care communication through a socio‐material approach in the context of palliative care; 2) students' discovery of the diverse and complex relations and interactions between humans and materials and (3) students' new perspectives on health care communication and the transfer of knowledge and skills through a socio‐material approach in clinical practice. Conclusions: This study highlights how SBE can be further expanded using a socio‐material approach to prepare students to learn beyond standardised and cognitively driven approaches and procedures. Student learning demonstrates that SBE may develop beyond high fidelity and standardisation to leave room for emergent learning and increased awareness in learning for students and teachers to optimise learning outcomes and competence. This study uses sociomateriality to advance understanding of complex human‐material interactions and explain how simulation can evolve beyond standardization to yield better learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The early stages of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic prompted unprecedented displays of gratitude to healthcare workers. In the United Kingdom, gratitude was a hotly debated topic in public discourse, catalysing compelling displays of civic togetherness but also attracting criticism for being an unhelpful distraction that authorized unrealistic expectations of healthcare workers. Expressions of thanks tend to be neglected as drivers of transformation, and yet, they are important indicators of qualities to which people attach significance. Objective: This study aimed to use discursive analysis to explore how the National Health Service (NHS) was constructed in attention‐attracting tweets that expressed and/or discussed gratitude to the NHS. Methods: Having determined that Twitter was the most active site for traffic relating to gratitude and the NHS, we established a corpus of 834 most‐liked tweets, purposively sampled from Twitter searches on a day‐by‐day basis over the period of the first lockdown in the United Kingdom (22 March–28 May 2020). We developed a typology for tweets engaging with gratitude as well as analysing what the NHS was thanked for. Results: Our analysis, informed by a discursive psychology approach, found that the meanings attributed to gratitude were highly mobile and there were distinct patterns of activity. The NHS was predominantly—and sometimes idealistically—thanked for working, effort, saving and caring. Displays of gratitude were seen as incommensurable with failures of responsibility. The clap‐for‐carers campaign was a potent driver of affect, especially in the early parts of the lockdown. Conclusions: The social value of gratitude is implicated in the re‐evaluation of the risks and rewards of healthcare and social care work in the wake of the pandemic. We caution against cynicism about gratitude overshadowing the well‐being effects that expressing and receiving gratitude can engender, particularly given concerns over the detrimental effects of the pandemic on mental health. Public Contribution: This study involves the analysis of data provided by the public and published on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To identify which patient and hospital characteristics are related to nurse staffing levels in acute care hospital settings. Design: A cross‐sectional design was used for this study. Methods: The sample comprised 1,004 patients across 10 hospitals in the Andalucian Health Care System (southern Spain) in 2015. The sampling was carried out in a stratified, consecutive manner on the basis of (a) hospital size by geographical location, (b) type of hospital unit, and (c) patients' sex and age group. Random criteria were used to select patients based on their user identification in the electronic health record system. The variables were grouped into two categories, patient and hospital characteristics. Multilevel linear regression models (MLMs) with random intercepts were used. Two models were fitted: the first was the null model, which contained no explanatory variables except the intercepts (fixed and random), and the second (explanatory) model included selected independent variables. Independent variables were allowed to enter the explanatory model if their univariate association with the nurse staffing level in the MLM was significant at p <.05. Results: Two hierarchical levels were established to control variance (patients and hospital). The model variables explained 63.4% of the variance at level 1 (patients) and 71.8% at level 2 (hospital). Statistically significant factors were the type of hospital unit (p =.002), shift (p <.001), and season (p <.001). None of the variables associated with patient characteristics obtained statistical significance in the model. Conclusions: Nurse staffing levels were associated with hospital characteristics rather than patient characteristics. Clinical Relevance: This study provides evidence about factors that impact on nurse staffing levels in the settings studied. Further studies should determine the influence of patient characteristics in determining optimal nurse staffing levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last three decades, sociomaterial approaches to the study of health care practices have made an important contribution to the sociology of health care. Significant attention has been paid to the role of technology and artefacts in health care and the operation of actor‐networks but less space has been given to questions of ontological multiplicity in health care practices. In this paper, we draw upon our study of patient experience data in five acute hospitals in England to illustrate how treating patient experience data as 'singular‐multiples' can enable useful insights into patient experience data work in health care organisations. Our data was generated during 12 months of fieldwork at five participating hospitals and included organisational documents, field notes, informal and formal interviews with frontline and managerial staff and patient representatives at the study sites. We use the examples of the Friends and Family Test (FFT) and the National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (NCPES) in England to consider the multiple nature of data as it is enacted in practice and the work data does when coordinated as an entity in the singular. We argue that, and discuss how, the sociomaterial insights we discuss here are relevant to health care quality and improvement research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BROOKS J and RAFFERTY AM. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 142–150 Education and role conflict in the health visitor profession, 1918–39 Health visiting was the public health profession in the UK, which arose during the Victorian period to support and supervise the mothers of the nation. The health visitor was expected to teach the new mothers hygiene, infant feeding and diet, help them in the home when necessary and then report back to the Medical Officer for Health. Her role therefore was multifaceted and required education and training from a number of differing bodies. She needed nursing skills to help with the practicalities of observation and home care, sanitary knowledge to ensure that the buildings were safe and training in law and epidemiology. In order to fulfil these professional requirements, by the middle of the twentieth century the health visitor was expected to be a nurse by background, be educated for health visiting in a university and understand community medicine. These differing and sometimes opposing requirements meant that the health visitor was often caught in-between conflicting ideologies. It is this idea of ‘in-betweenness’ from the work of the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern and its relation to the work and education of the health visitor that this article will focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nursing and the Research Assessment Exercise: past, present and future In this paper we examine approaches to undertaking nursing research and building research capacity in higher education institutions in the United Kingdom (UK). First we review some of the main responses in the literature to the last two Research Assessment Exercises (RAE), then we report findings from a small study of nursing departments which entered the last RAE and finally we speculate on the likely future of nursing research in the light of recent education and health policy. We suggest that many of the difficulties experienced are an effect of contradictory health and education policies and rival ways of assessing research performance. Nursing education is caught in the ‘pincer movement’ of stringency in both sectors. In addition, the challenges of the RAE and the necessity to earn income from contracting with National Health Service (NHS) education and training consortia for teaching represent an outworking of two rival views of the role of higher education, broadly an elitist view and one that sees higher education as a supplier of the workforce needs of industry. In addition to this, the NHS R&D (research and development) strategy provides an alternative arena for collaboration, funding and reputation to that constructed by the RAE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art, science and social science in nursing: occupational origins and disciplinary identity This paper forms part of a wider study examining the history and sociology of nursing education in England between 1860 and 1948. It argues that the question of whether nursing was an art, science and/or social science has been at die 'heart' of a wider debate on die occupational status and disciplinary identity of nursing. The view that nursing was essentially an art and a 'calling', was championed by Florence Nightingale. Ethel Bedford Fenwick and her allies insisted that nursing, like other professions, was a 'scientific' and technical enterprise. Social scientists later came to challenge nursing's claim to professionalism by analysing nursing work first within die context of industrial psychology. But they also advocated a rapprochement between nursing, health services and social science research, a challenge which we are in nursing, still striving to meet This paper argues for a strong coalition of nursing with its former nineteenth century ally, social science, in die continuing struggle for change within nursing and health care policy. Rather than searching for some rarified and purified essence of nursing knowledge, it argues that nurses need to join forces with sociologists and economists in striving to shape die agenda for health services research and provide die evidential basis for health policy transformation more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on an editorial by Jane Robinson in an issue of the "Journal of Advanced Nursing," which shows that bibliometric data can be a useful tool in a broad inquiry into the state of a discipline and its publishing trends. The research discussed by Robinson is the work that the author and her colleagues carried out at the British Centre for Policy in Nursing Research (CPNR). In their CPNR analysis of published research they had designated the terms endogenous and exogenous research to refer to research focused on internal nursing issues.

Nurses make an important contribution to the organisation and coordination of patient care but receive little formal educational preparation for this work. This paper builds on Allen's care trajectory management framework to specify evidence‐based and theoretically informed competencies for this component of the nursing role and proposes how these might be incorporated into nursing curricula. This is necessary so that at the point of registration nurses have the expertise to realise their potential as both providers and organisers of patient care and are better able to articulate and develop this aspect of nursing practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]