1,720,990 research outputs found
What is important to measure in the last months and weeks of life?: A modified nominal group study.
No full textBackground: Identifying the most important issues for palliative care patients and their families, and assessing whether services address these appropriately is important. Little is known about the views of United Kingdom service users and whether, and in what ways, they differ from those in the published literature from other countries, or from health professionals.
Aims: To investigate what is important to measure at the end of life from the perspectives of United Kingdom patients, bereaved relatives and health care professionals.
Methods: Ten focus groups, using a modified nominal group technique, with a total of 75 participants (10 patients, 35 professionals and 30 bereaved relatives) enabled issues participants thought important to measure at the end of life to be identified and prioritised using ratings and rankings. Thematic analysis of the data was conducted to enable cross-group comparison.
Findings: Seven themes were identified as most important to participants: symptom management; choice and control; dignity; quality of life; preparation; relationships; and co-ordination and continuity. Bereaved relatives and professionals emphasised symptom management, relationships and quality of life, whilst patients prioritised issues around preparation.
Conclusions: The study was successful in identifying aspects of end of life care that are important to patients, families and health professionals in the United Kingdom. Although participants were not representative of the wider population in the United Kingdom, the degree of concordance with published studies from outside the United Kingdom increases the credibility of the findings. Quality assurance initiatives need to ensure that they act on information such as this on users’ priorities. Further research is needed to test out the findings in other settings in the United Kingdom, to build on the findings about different participants’ views and to identify similarities and variations between countries
Translating clinical tools in nursing practice
No full textBackground. The widespread use of clinical tools in nursing practice reflects their usefulness in guiding patient care, evaluating treatment effectiveness and conducting audit. Cultural awareness and the provision of culturally competent care is a high priority for nurses in the United Kingdom (UK), given patterns of increasing ethnic diversity. However, meeting the individual needs of patients can be difficult when language barriers hinder communication. One way to address these difficulties is to translate existing clinical tools.Aim. The aim of this paper is to appraise the potential for, and limitations of, translating clinical tools for use in nursing practice.Discussion. Drawing on a range of studies from the disciplines of health and social science, this review describes and discusses some key considerations relevant to translating clinical tools in nursing. These considerations include the need to ensure cultural equivalence, lack of familiarity with clinical tool formats in some cultures and its impact on responses, and low literacy levels in some populations.Conclusion. Clinical tools provide benefits in identifying patients' problems, guiding patient care, and evaluating treatments and interventions. Translating these tools can help to bridge the language gap that hinders good communication between nurses and patients. Translated clinical tools can be of acceptable cultural equivalence and validity if high quality translation methodologies are employed, together with an awareness of culturally relevant issues when interpreting the information gained from the tools
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
A research study to identify facilitators and barriers to outcome measure implementation
Full text linkAim: To identify facilitators and barriers to implementing outcome measures. Methods: An action-research approach within a hospice
and nursing home was used. Staff took part in semistructured interviews pre- and post-implementation of the Palliative Care Outcome Scale (POS), completed diaries and participated in monthly meetings. Findings: Qualitative content analysis identified barriers to implementation including: a top-down decision-making approach; outcome measures perceived as time-consuming to use; limited resources for data analysis; and a lack of knowledge of the importance of outcome measures. Facilitators to successful implementation include: involving all staff in decisions about implementation; and using a measure that can be adapted to organization needs and clinical practice. The benefits of using the measure are rapidly noticeable.
Conclusions: Given the need to evaluate services and the role outcome measures can have within clinical governance, this article indicates methods by which measures may be more successfully implemented
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
