General Practitioners involvement in enteral tube feeding at home: a qualitative study.

Background: Complex medical treatment is moving from hospital to primary care and General Practitioners (GPs) are increasingly asked to undertake new roles. There are now an estimated 19,500 patients being fed in the UK in the community on enteral tube feeding using a variety of different feeding tubes (Percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG), Jejunostomy, or nasogastric (NG). The majority of patients are over the age of 65 years when they had artificial feeding initiated and mainly because of dysphagia.

Nutrition and disaster preparedness: focusing on vulnerability, building capacities.

Many disasters that occur throughout the world remain largely under-reported, frequently because they began a number of years ago, and have become "chronic" or "long term." Yet, in their vulnerability, the affected populations are no less deserving of humanitarian aid than those involved in the more acute, sudden disasters that make a major impact in the media. Aid providers need to direct their efforts at enabling populations to build their capacity and decrease their vulnerability, thus enhancing their preparedness for any future disaster.

An improved methodology for advancing nursing research: factorial surveys.

Clinical judgments and decisions are an integral component of nurse work and nurses are increasingly being challenged to account for their judgments and decisions. Nursing research is needed to help explain judgment and decision making in nursing, but most research in this area is almost exclusively characterized by descriptive studies. This article describes the use of the factorial survey method, which combines the explanatory power of a factorial experiment with the benefits of a sample survey.