The link between nursing discourses and nurses' silence: implications for a knowledge-based discourse for nursing practice.

Much emphasis has been placed on the importance of nurses' articulating what they do to counteract the invisibility of nursing practice. Yet there has been minimal focus on why nurses are silent. This article explores the link between technical and caring discourses and nurses' silence and suggests an alternative discourse that conceptualizes nursing as a knowledge-driven enterprise that shifts the focus from what nurses do to what nurses know by promoting nurses' practice knowledge as a language for articulating their practice.

Illuminating the clinical nurse specialist role of advanced practice nursing: a qualitative study.

As the advanced practice nursing initiative in Canada gains momentum, effort is being directed towards clarifying and defining advanced practice roles. A qualitative study was undertaken to increase understanding of the clinical nurse specialist role of advanced practice. Sixteen nurses who worked in advanced practice roles, organizing and providing healthcare for children with complex health needs and their families across the continuum of care, participated in in-depth conversations about the nature of their practice, the knowledge that informs it and the factors that influence it.

Parent-nurse interactions: care of hospitalized children.

Background: An essential component of quality nursing care is nurses' ability to work with parents in the hospital care of their children. However, changes in the health care environment have presented nurses with many new challenges, including meeting family-centred care expectations.

Aim Of The Paper: To report a research study examining the experiences of parents who interacted with nurses in a hospital setting regarding the care of their children.

Embedded assumptions in qualitative studies of fatigue.

Qualitative researchers have long recognized that fatigue is a common concern among those with chronic illness; however, the insights derived from this body of inquiry have not been synthesized into a coherent body of clinical knowledge that could provide direction for nursing practice. Using a synthesis approach of meta-study, the authors identify four predominant assumptions embedded in qualitative studies that have influenced the way researchers have interpreted and made sense of their findings about fatigue in chronic illness over the past two decades. They argue that these assumptions may have inhibited the development of more dynamic, comprehensive understandings of fatigue.

Chronic illness experience: insights from a metastudy.

Concurrent with the recent enthusiasm for qualitative research in the health fields, an energetic call for methods by which to synthesize the knowledge has been generated on various substantive topics. Although there is an emerging literature on meta-analysis and metasynthesis, many authors overestimate the simplicity of such approaches and erroneously assume that useful knowledge can be synthesized from limited collections of study reports without a thorough analysis of their theoretical, methodological, and contextual foundations and features. In this article, the authors report some of the insights obtained from an extensive and exhaustive metastudy of qualitative studies of chronic illness experience.