Publications by authors named "Martin S McNamara"
Aims And Objectives: To collate, synthesise and discuss published evidence and expert professional opinion on enablers and barriers to the development and sustainability of specialist and advanced practice roles in nursing and midwifery.
Background: Expanded practice is a response to population health needs, healthcare costs and practitioners' willingness to expand their scope of practice through enhanced responsibility, accountability and professional autonomy.
Design: This discursive paper is based on a rapid review of literature on enablers and barriers to the development and sustainability of specialist and advanced practice roles and is part of a wider policy analysis.
Aims And Objectives: To inform and guide the development of a future model of specialist and advanced nursing and midwifery practice.
Background: There is a sizable body of empirical literature supporting the unique contributions of specialist and advanced practice roles to health care. However, there is very little international evidence to inform the integration of a future model for advanced or specialist practice in the Irish healthcare system.
Aim: To explore the perceptions of key stakeholders of the roles of specialist and advanced nursing and midwifery practitioners.
Background: There is evidence that the contribution of these roles to patient care is poorly understood.
Design: This research took place over 2 months in 2015 and is part of a larger study involving a rapid review to inform policy development on the specialist and advanced nursing and midwifery practice in Ireland.
Aim: A discussion of the potential use of rapid review approaches in nursing and midwifery research which presents a worked example from a study conducted to inform policy decision-making.
Background: Rapid reviews, which can be defined as outputs of a knowledge synthesis approach that involves modifying or omitting elements of a systematic review process due to limited time or resources, are becoming increasingly popular in health research. This paper provides guidance on how a rapid review can be undertaken and discusses the strengths and challenges of the approach.
Aims And Objectives: To evaluate mentoring, coaching and action learning interventions used to develop nurses' and midwives' clinical leadership competencies and to describe the programme participants' experiences of the interventions.
Background: Mentoring, coaching and action learning are effective interventions in clinical leadership development and were used in a new national clinical leadership development programme, introduced in Ireland in 2011. An evaluation of the programme focused on how participants experienced the interventions.
Aim: The study reported here was part of a larger study, which evaluated a national clinical leadership development programme with reference to resources, participant experiences, participant outcomes and service impact. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the programme's service impact.
Background: Clinical leadership development develops competencies that are expressed in context.
Critical discourse analysis was used to examine the visibility of nursing as a distinct discipline on the websites of academic nursing schools in Ireland. The analysis focused on the content of the schools' websites, including the available undergraduate curricular materials. The websites of a purposive sample of academic nursing schools in Canada, Scandinavia, and Australia were also analyzed for comparative purposes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: To describe Irish nurses' views of clinical leadership and to describe their clinical leadership development needs.
Background: Nurses are often unclear about the precise nature of clinical leadership and its impact on the processes and outcomes of care and little is known about their self-perceived clinical leadership development needs.
Design: Seventeen focus group interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 144 nurses from 13 practice settings.
Aims And Objectives: To describe self-reported barriers to clinical leadership development among nurses and midwives in Ireland.
Background: Effective clinical leadership is essential for optimising care and improving patient outcomes. Clinical leadership development is concerned with intrapersonal and interpersonal capabilities and is context bound.
This article reports the findings of a structural analysis of the field of academic nursing in Ireland and considers the implications of the field's current structure for its present status and future trajectory in the academy. Six years after preregistration nursing education transferred to the higher education sector, tensions continue to exist concerning the status and legitimacy of academic nursing and of those who profess to profess it. The languages of legitimation of senior nursing academics and national nursing leaders (n = 16) were elicited and subjected to a critical discourse analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims And Objectives: The aim was to examine, critically, 19th century hospital sanitary reform with reference to theories about infection and contagion.
Background: In the nineteenth century, measures to control epidemic diseases focused on providing clean water, removing waste and isolating infected cases. These measures were informed by the ideas of sanitary reformers like Chadwick and Nightingale, and hospitals were an important element of sanitary reform.
A critical discourse analysis of Irish nurse academics' comments reveals a dependent, fragmented discipline with a weak academic infrastructure, prone to colonization by other discourses. Respondents lack a language that articulates an academic and professional nursing identity, the form and content of educational programs that are distinctively nursing, and lack the proper focus and scope of nursing research. These findings are discussed in light of the role of academic clinical practice and nursing discipline-specific discourses in providing the conditions of possibility for the establishment, maintenance, and reproduction of a critical mass of nurse scholars with both academic and clinical legitimacy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: To elicit the languages of legitimation of senior nursing academics and national leaders and to investigate the extent to which distinctive disciplinary identities and discourses are embedded in them.
Background: Over six years after Irish nursing education became established in the higher education sector, an investigation into the disciplinary maturity of the field is overdue.
Design: A constructivist-structuralist research design was used; data were elicited by means of naturalistic professional conversations and subjected to critical discourse analytic methods to interrogate their structuring and structured character.
Aim: To identify the proclaimed bases of Irish nursing academics' identities as academics and to interrogate the ways in which they legitimate nursing as an academic discipline.
Background: Six years after pre-registration nursing education in Ireland transferred to the higher education sector, tensions continue to exist concerning the status and legitimacy of the discipline and those who claim to profess it.
Method: The languages of legitimation of senior nursing academics were elicited in the deliberately argumentative conversational context characteristic of many discourse analytic studies.
Aim: To investigate the potential of recent conceptual developments in the sociology of education for conceptualising academic leadership in nursing.
Background: During an investigation into the current status and future trajectory of academic nursing in Ireland, academic leadership emerged as a major concern for respondents.
Method: The languages of legitimation of academic leaders were elicited in in-depth interviews and analysed as expressions of underlying legitimation principles.
Aims And Objectives: The research aims to illuminate the essential elements of the role of the clinical placement co-ordinator.
Background: Clinical placement co-ordinators were introduced to Irish health-care settings to support the clinical learning of nursing students after the ending of the apprenticeship model of nurse training and in the context of reforms culminating in the introduction of the BSc (Nursing) degree as the sole route of entry to practice in 2002.
Design: A phenomenological design was used in order to explicate the necessary and sufficient elements of the role from clinical placement co-ordinators' accounts of their experiences of and in the post.
Aim: In light of debates arising from recent developments in Irish nursing education, this paper analyses tensions in the positioning of nursing in academia in terms of notions of the sacred and profane, and the symbolic boundaries between them, and discusses the implications of this analysis for nurse academics' identities.
Background: The entry of nursing education to the higher education sector has occurred against a discursive backcloth of opposition which constructs nursing work as either sacred, and under threat from the academy, or profane, and unworthy of a place in it.
Method: Conceptual resources derived from the work of Basil Bernstein are deployed to analyse the forces driving the loom weaving this discursive backcloth.
Background: It was only at the start of the 21st century that the nursing profession in Ireland gained full entry to the academy, joining the ranks of the graduate professions in healthcare. Up to that time, the system of professional training of nurses in Ireland was based on the apprenticeship-training model.
Aim: This paper critically analyses discourses opposing advanced educational preparation for nurses and the entry of nursing to higher education in order to reveal the discursive work they perform.
Phenomenological research in nursing has come under sustained attack in recent years with some nurse researchers accused of betraying the fundamental tenets of phenomenology and of misconstruing its key concepts. This paper aims to show how a study informed by the critique of 'nursing phenomenology' was designed and conducted. In particular, the implications of the key phenomenological concepts of intentionality and bracketing for data collection, data analysis and the presentation of findings are explored in relation to an investigation of the concept of the Clinical Placement Coordinator (CPC), an innovative student support role in Irish nursing education.
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