Exploring clinical leadership in long-term care: An integrative literature review.

Aim: The aim of this study is to understand the concept of clinical leadership and clinical leadership development for nurses working with older adults in long-term care health care facilities.

Background: In Canada, clinical care within long-term care is undertaken by registered nurses and licenced practical nurses working with health care aides. Effective clinical leadership is essential for providing quality nursing care.

Fidelity Assessment Checklist Development for Community Nursing Research in Early Childhood.

Nurses play an important role in promoting positive childhood development via early interventions intended to support parenting. Despite recognizing the need to deliver vital parenting programs, monitoring fidelity has largely been ignored. Fidelity refers to the degree to which healthcare programs follow a well-defined set of criteria specifically designed for a particular program model.

Convergent Validity of Three Measures of Reflective Function: Parent Development Interview, Parental Reflective Function Questionnaire, and Reflective Function Questionnaire.

Reflective function (RF) is defined as an individual's ability to understand human behavior in terms of underlying mental states including thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs, and intentions. More specifically, the capacity of parents to keep their child's mental states in mind is referred to as parental RF. RF has been linked to adult mental health and parental RF to children's mental health and development.

Effect of the Attachment and Child Health Parent Training Program on Parent-Child Interaction Quality and Child Development.

Background: Exposure to chronic stressors (poverty, addiction, family violence) in early life can derail children's development. Interventions focused on parental reflective function may promote parents' abilities to regulate their feelings and behaviors toward their children and buffer the impact of chronic stressors on children's development by nurturing high-quality parent-child interaction.

Purpose: To test the effectiveness of parental reflective function-focused intervention entitled Attachment and Child Health on parent-child interaction and child development.

Postpositivist critical multiplism: Its value for nursing research.

Aim: Following persistent criticisms of logical positivism, postpositivism emerged as a philosophy of science for developing nursing knowledge. Here, we offer a discussion of postpositivist critical multiplism and its value to nursing research.

Design: Discussion paper.

An interpretive phenomenological study of recovering from mental illness: Teenage girls' portrayals of resilience.

In this interpretive phenomenological study, understandings of resilience from the perspective of teenage girls recovering from mental illness were explored. The primary research question was as follows: How is resilience portrayed through teen girls' experiences of health and mental illness? Benner's interpretive phenomenology informed by Gadamerian concepts of conversation, prejudices, and fusion of horizons guided the research design. The interpretive description process involved close reading of how the world experienced by participants was understood while listening for relational, gendered and cultural nuances.

Harlequin-Inspired Story-Based Learning: An Educational Innovation for Pediatric Nursing Communication.

Background: Effective communication with patients and families is essential for quality care in the pediatric environment. Despite this, the current structure and content of undergraduate nursing education often contributes to novice RNs feeling unprepared to manage complex pediatric communication situations.

Method: By merging the characteristics of the Harlequin persona with the structure of story-based learning, undergraduate students can be introduced to increasingly advanced pediatric communication scenarios in the classroom.

A Decolonizing Methodology for Health Research on Female Genital Cutting.

In this article, critical perspectives including postcolonial feminism, African feminism, and intersectionality are presented as having decolonizing methodological potential whereby the Western narrative surrounding the practice of female genital cutting, particularly in the context of migration, is reexamined. In addition, multiple intersecting influences on affected women's realities are accounted for and a critical consciousness that serves to inform praxis, address social determinants of health, and promote health equity is encouraged. The inclusion of an African feminist perspective, a traditionally marginalized critical perspective, serves to further decolonize some long-held erroneous beliefs about the sexuality, subjectivity, and embodiment of the African woman.

Sociocultural Influences on Arab Women's Participation in Breast Cancer Screening in Qatar.

Breast cancer, the most common cancer among Arab women in Qatar, significantly affects the morbidity and mortality of Arab women largely because of low participation rates in breast cancer screening. We used a critical ethnographic approach to uncover and describe factors that influence Arab women's breast cancer screening practices. We conducted semistructured interviews with 15 health care practitioners in Qatar.

Caring for patients with limb amputation.

This article provides an overview of the care of patients undergoing limb amputation. Absence of a limb can be congenital or the result of trauma or complications of chronic diseases. While the economic burden of limb amputation is significant, nurses have an important role in limiting other losses attributable to limb loss, such as long-term disability leading to loss of employment and delayed return to work or school.

Practice uncertainty: changing perceptions.

Practice uncertainty is inevitable in health care, and there are many contextual factors that can lead to either good or bad outcomes for patients and health care providers. Practice uncertainty is not a well-established concept in the literature, perhaps because of the predominant empirical paradigm and the high value placed on certainty within current health care culture. This study was conducted to explore practice uncertainty and bring this topic into the foreground as a first step toward practice evolution.

Making time for reflexive dialogue in philosophical group discussion: extending the debate on the militarization of nursing.

In the 2010 July-September issue of Advances in Nursing Science, Perron et al offered a persuasive and substantive account of the troubling incursion of military speech into nursing practice and education. The article proved contentious, resulting in accusations of fallacious misrepresentation. This article extends the philosophical debate initiated by Perron et al on the militarization of nursing and the war on terror and offers the perspectives of members of a philosophical discussion group who took up the challenge to engage in critical debate and dialogue on the ways in which external organizations penetrate nursing education, practice, and knowledge.

Interprofessional collaboration-in-practice: the contested place of ethics.

The main question examined is: How do nurses and other healthcare professionals ensure ethical interprofessional collaboration-in-practice as an everyday practice actuality? Ethical interprofessional collaboration becomes especially relevant and necessary when interprofessional practice decisions are contested. To illustrate, two healthcare scenarios are analyzed through three ethics lenses. Biomedical ethics, relational ethics, and virtue ethics provide different ways of knowing how to be ethical and to act ethically as healthcare professionals.

Responsiveness of the Eating Disorders Quality of Life Scale (EDQLS) in a longitudinal multi-site sample.

Background: In eating disorders (EDs), treatment outcome measurement has traditionally focused on symptom reduction rather than functioning or quality of life (QoL). The Eating Disorders Quality of Life Scale (EDQLS) was recently developed to allow for measurement of broader outcomes. We examined responsiveness of the EDQLS in a longitudinal multi-site study.

The textual organization of placement into long-term care: issues for older adults with mental illness.

Arranging placement of older adults from hospital mental health units into nursing homes or assisted living facilities can be difficult and protracted. The difficulty in placing these individuals is often attributed to stigma; that is, personnel in nursing homes are reluctant to accept mentally ill older adults because of the fear of mental illness and violence. Using an institutional ethnographic approach, we argue the importance of exploring how nursing home access is organized, especially the institutional process of placement.

Pedagogy, power and practice ethics: clinical teaching in psychiatric/mental health settings.

Often, baccalaureate nursing students initially approach a psychiatric mental health practicum with uncertainty, and even fear. They may feel unprepared for the myriad complex practice situations encountered. In addition, memories of personal painful life events may be vicariously evoked through learning about and listening to the experiences of those diagnosed with mental disorders.

Development and multi-site validation of a new condition-specific quality of life measure for eating disorders.

Background: In eating disorders (EDs) treatment, outcome measurement has traditionally focused on symptom reduction rather than functioning or quality of life (QoL). Generic QoL measures lack sensitivity for some diagnoses and many not be responsive in eating disorder patients. This article describes the development and validation of a condition-specific QoL measure for adolescents and adults with eating disorders--the Eating Disorders Quality of Life Scale (EDQLS).

Targeting students, teachers and parents in a wellness-based prevention program in schools.

This study examines the effectiveness of a wellness-based prevention program on elementary and junior high students' body image, personal attitudes, and eating behaviors. Group differences in measures of student attitudes and eating behaviors are examined to determine the effect of targeting different participant combinations (students, parents, and teachers) in 10 groups. For elementary schools, student participants consisted of control (no intervention) (n = 36), student only (n = 81), student/parent (n = 124), student/parent/teacher (n = 103), and parent/teacher (n = 149).