Nurse education today
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The European Resuscitation Council (ERC) has produced basic life support (BLS) and advanced life support (ALS) guidelines (1992) in an attempt to standardize the training and delivery of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). In response to this, the Avon and Gloucestershire College of Health, Glenside Centre (now University of the West of England), conducted a small survey, testing students' knowledge and skills in delivering CPR. Students were able to improve knowledge levels, but did not uniformly improve practical skills. ⋯ Student results and attendance are stored on a college database, along with tutor information regarding updating of CPR skills. To achieve these developments, the college has had to consider time allocation within the curriculum, training of tutors, funding of resources and funding of a compulsory training programme, which supports a ratio of one tutor to six students. Evaluations of the changes are favourable, as students' CPR skills and knowledge show obvious improvement and the students' general confidence and enthusiasm are enhanced.
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Nurse education today · Dec 1995
Developing the sociology of health in nurse education: towards a more critical curriculum--part I: andragogy and sociology in Project 2000.
This paper examines the potential for developing a more critical and reflexive curriculum around the sociology of health in nurse education. In Part One a review of the literature on Project 2000 to date suggests that insufficient attention has been paid to the scope for linking methodological and epistemological issues. it is argued that the status of 'andragogy' as a strategy of teaching and learning is ill-defined and that the nature of sociological theory in nurse education remains too crude and dichotomous to produce the 'knowledgeable doer', a qualitatively different kind of professional nurse practitioner.
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Nurse education today · Oct 1995
The 'political correctness' debate and caring in psychiatric nursing.
In recent years the controversy over so-called 'political correctness' has figured prominently in discourses of higher education. In terms of nursing, the issue of 'political correctness' cannot be confined to intellectual word-games, but is of key significance in the debate around the nature of professional caring. ⋯ After discussing the particular problems which arise when the three issues of 'political correctness', 'caring' and humanistic psychology are brought together in this way; it proposes a politically focused strategy for the future development of psychiatric nursing. Although it is written from the perspective of psychiatric nursing in Britain and is very much concerned with the use of a particular language; the arguments put forward are equally appropriate to other English-speaking countries, and perhaps also to non-English speaking countries.
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This paper explores the notion that contemporary teaching practices reinforce and maintain the legitimacy of traditional relations of power between teachers and students of nursing. Nurse teachers and clinicians have socially constructed and legitimated power over students which acts to constrain the development of critical consciousness. Student-centred learning packages and strategies such as problem-solving, questioning and dialogue may give the impression of student empowerment while leaving the authoritarian nature of teacher-student relationships intact. ⋯ This situation creates a major dilemma for all teachers since the contradictions between classroom knowledge and experiential clinical knowledge are seldom officially recognised. The rhetoric of critical social science however, suggests that emancipation and empowerment of teachers and students would follow their enlightenment as to the nature of these contradictions. This assumption discounts the ways in which hegemonic ideology shapes the consciousness of nurses to accept dominant views of what constitutes professional practice or legitimate knowledge and how that may be obtained.
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This article sets out the nature and purpose of the literature review as it is found in the nursing research literature. The 'standard' method of the construction of a review is set out and criticised as non-systematic and unnecessarily time consuming. ⋯ The alternative is laid out and the benefits demonstrated. Finally the criteria for an adequate review defined and the necessity for the Network method in the fulfillment of the criteria is emphasised.