Journal of advanced nursing
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The lived experience of clinical development unit (nursing) leadership in Western Sydney, Australia.
A network of nine Clinical Development Units (Nursing) (CDU(N)) were recently created in the Western Sydney Area Health Service. These units are designed to develop patient-focused nursing practice through group process and action research, based on principles of transformational leadership. ⋯ Insights harvested from this study have since been incorporated into a revised leadership preparation programme and support mechanisms for the leaders of eight new Clinical Development Units (Nursing) in the Western Sydney Area Health Service.
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This article presents the results of an ethnographic study exploring how teenagers negotiated motherhood. The main aims of the study were to explore how the young women negotiated motherhood and how they constructed their own identities and relationships through teenage parenting. ⋯ It was concluded that becoming a sole-supporting mother during the teenage years was a difficult struggle for the young women, because of their youth, their lack of preparation for motherhood and their reliance on welfare supports. In addition, they experienced negative public attitudes directed towards them wherever they went, and this included their visits to community child health centres. Recommendations are made for nurses to take a different approach when working with teenage mothers to help ameliorate the negative impact of poor parenting.
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Burnout in nursing is of both individual and organizational concern with ramifications for well-being, job performance, absenteeism and turnover. Burnout is rarely assessed as part of a comprehensive model of occupational stress, a short-coming which this paper attempts to redress. ⋯ The paper discusses the implications of the findings in terms of a comprehensive approach to intervention aimed at minimizing the risk of burnout in psychiatric nurses. Such an approach will involve interventions at the organizational and individual level.
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Government health care policy urges service providers to involve service users in the decision-making process. Research studies have recommended changes to current health care practice to facilitate this involvement. However, carers' organizations continue to highlight a gap between policy and practice in relation to involvement. ⋯ The reported experiences of carers in this study highlighted four markers of satisfactory involvement: feeling that information is shared; feeling included in decision making; feeling that there is someone you can contact when you need to; and feeling that the service is responsive to your needs. The majority of carers felt dissatisfied with the level of involvement. The situation we found echoed that found in other studies, i.e. the majority of informal carers (henceforth 'carers') interviewed were dissatisfied with the level of their involvement. However, our investigation, in which the views of health care professionals as well as those of carers were sought, provided invaluable insight into why this might be the case. Two main sources of difficulty were found: hospital systems and processes, and the relationship between nursing staff and carers. The argument made is that practitioners themselves must notice and challenge these barriers if carer involvement is to be facilitated.
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The aims of this study were to describe the number, kind, and intensity of caregiving activities performed by individuals who assumed caregiving responsibilities, as youngsters, for adults with chronic physical illnesses; to explore the meaning and effects of the caregiving experience on those individuals; and to examine positive and negative effects of caregiving then and now. ⋯ Professional caregivers should raise questions in their practice regarding involvement in caregiving by both adults and youngsters. If youngsters participate in caregiving in the home, they need to receive adequate information regarding care and the illness trajectory. Family-related research including the long-term effects of such experiences on the youngsters and their families is recommended.