An online listserv for nurse practitioners: a viable venue for continuous nursing professional development?

This study reports the results of a qualitative study involving a large and longstanding online nurse listserv in the United States. A sample of 27 critical care and advanced-practice nurse practitioners was interviewed using semi-structured individual interviews. This study found evidence that participation in an online listserv offers a viable avenue for the continuous professional development of nurses by providing nurses the opportunity to make more informed decisions about their professional practice and keeping abreast with up-to-date changes in their specialty areas when they shared knowledge with one another. Follow-up interviews with 10 nurses who frequently shared their knowledge revealed six motivators that helped promote knowledge sharing: (a) reciprocity, (b) collectivism, (c) personal gain, (d) respectful environment, (e) altruism, and (f) technology. Implications for sustaining knowledge sharing in an online listserv are discussed. The finding will inform educators and administrators who support continuing education and professional development of healthcare professionals.     

Real nursing? The development of telenursing

Title. Real nursing? The development of telenursing Aim. This paper is a report of a study to understand the impact of telenursing from the perspective of nurses involved in its provision, and in more traditional roles. Background. Nurse‐led telephone helplines have recently been introduced across the United Kingdom, a major step in the development of nursing practice. Method. A structured questionnaire was sent to all nurses working in the NHS Direct (National Health Service Direct) Wales telephone service (n = 111). Ninety‐two completed questionnaires were returned (response rate 83 per cent). Two focus groups were conducted: one with telephone service nurses (n = 8) and one with other nurses (n = 5). The data were collected in 2002. Findings. Respondents represented a highly educated workforce from a range of healthcare specialties. They reported that they joined the telephone service for improved salary and flexible working. Two‐thirds reported improved job satisfaction. All focus group participants reported that the development of nursing skills was affected by the use of decision support software and the remote nature of the consultation. Participants reported opportunities for skill development, although the role could be stressful. All agreed that the service was popular with callers, but the nurses from outside raised concerns about whether telenursing was ‘real’ nursing and about the evidence base for the service and access by disadvantaged groups. Conclusion. Differences between the groups reflect policy tensions between the need to develop new nursing skills, including the use of technology, to improve efficiency and recognition of the worth of hands‐on nursing. These tensions must be addressed for the telephone service to function as part of an integrated healthcare system.     

Technology is changing: is the continuing professional development also changing?

This paper considers the impact of the new information environment on the scientific communication. Reading behavior changes: today, we browse, scan, watch, receive an impression of something. The new reading habits are not simply determined by the new tools; they are rather influenced by the need to produce and share data and information, using personalized and mobile devices. Also the content formats change: researchers, clinicians, and nurses produce texts, figures, tables, photos, videos, tweets, blog posts and they share them to readers that have to collect, appraise, recombine and - most importantly - contextualize the information. This "continuous partial production" is consistent with a "continuous partial utilization" of data; this is a risk, but it is also an opportunity. On the one side, we risk a self-referential, individualized learning process; on the other side, we can enjoy the extraordinary chance to build a "shared learning environment", able to give a comprehensive solution to the challenges experienced by the health systems. Medical journals survive as valuable media to organize data and information; the new social web tools should support the traditional publishing patterns, to enhance the sharing of information, to help the appraisal of data, and to move forward new communities of learners.     

How many stratification factors are “too many” to use in a randomization plan?

The issue of stratification and its role in patient assignment has generated much discussion, mostly focused on its importance to a study [1,2] or lack thereof [3,4]. This report focuses on a much narrower problem: assuming that stratified assignment is desired, how many factors can be accommodated? This problem is investigated for two methods of balanced patient assignments; the first is based on the minimization method of Taves [5] and the second on the commonly used method of stratified assignment [6,7]. Stimulation results show that the former method can accommodate a large number of factors (10–20) without difficulty but that the latter begins to fail if the total number of distinct combination of factor levels is greater than approximately n/2. The two methods are related to a linear discriminant model, which helps to explain the results.     

How relevant is the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews to nursing care?

Barriers obstructing evidence‐based nursing have been explored in many countries. Lack of resources and evidence has been noted as one of these barriers. We aimed to identify nursing care‐related systematic reviews published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews from 1996 until 2009. Using a broad search strategy we identified titles of Cochrane systematic reviews and protocols that focused on nursing care. The abstract of each title was examined and predetermined data were collected and analysed. 1249 titles out of a possible 6244 records were identified as being relevant to nursing care. Most of them focused on newborn and adult populations and related to comparing one intervention with another, and management strategies. The most common nursing specialties represented were internal medicine (34%) and mother and child care (25%). Twenty one percent of reviews published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews are of direct interest to those involved in nursing care however their relevance was not always obvious.