International journal of nursing studies
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Families who have a child with epilepsy show a significant impact on both the dynamics of the child's development and family systems in a social context. Knowledge of a family's lived experience in dealing with the early stages of their child's illness will provide a deeper understanding of their life and coping process. Most studies have focused on the child's developmental issues, parental attitudes, coping strategies and the child's adjustment. In order to assist families to cope with the early stage of having a child with epilepsy, nurses need to understand the nature of a family's lived experience. ⋯ Three concepts emerged: parents' psychological reactions, parental coping patterns and family resources. The parents' psychological reaction was that of being emotionally traumatized and physically exhausted. Parental coping patterns were vigilant parenting and aimed at reframing roles, facing the social challenge and assisting the child's social re-integration. The nature of family resources was family resiliency. The findings provide a scientific knowledge base for nurses when assisting parents and children during the health to illness transitional phase following a diagnosis of epilepsy.
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Journals are an important method for disseminating research findings and other evidence for practice to nurses. Bibliometric analyses of nursing journals can reveal information about authorship, types of documents cited, and how information is communicated in nursing, among other characteristics. ⋯ Our study documented that journal literature was the primary source of information for communication within nursing. This is consistent with other biomedical and hard sciences where the transfer, assimilation, and use of information occur mainly within the scientific community. With a reliance on journal articles for dissemination of research and evidence for clinical practice, improved methods will be needed for integrating this knowledge and presenting it in a usable form to clinicians. As journals proliferate, it will become increasingly difficult for clinicians to keep current with research findings to guide their practice. The development and testing of new methods for integrating and disseminating research evidence to busy clinicians will be increasingly important in nursing. Gray literature was nearly 10% of the citations. The study also revealed an increase in citations to websites, which is anticipated to continue in the future. Further study is needed on the indexing of gray literature relevant to research use and evidence-based practice in nursing and on how to make this literature easily available to clinicians.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Motivational interviewing to change quality of life for people with chronic heart failure: a randomised controlled trial.
Patients with chronic heart failure have a reduced quality of life due in part to their limited range of physical activity and independence. ⋯ This study has demonstrated that a 'motivational interviewing' intervention, incorporating behaviour change principles to promote physical activity, is effective in increasing selected aspects of a general quality of life questionnaire and a disease-specific quality of life questionnaire. Thus a 'motivational interviewing' approach is a viable option compared with traditional exercise programming. It is important to test these motivational interviewing interventions more widely, especially to match individuals to treatments.
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The purpose of this study was to translate the Diabetes Management Self-Efficacy Scale (DMSES) into Chinese and test the validity and reliability of the instrument within a Taiwanese population. ⋯ The C-DMSES is a brief and psychometrically sound measure for evaluation of self-efficacy towards management of diabetes by persons with type 2 diabetes in Chinese populations.
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Mentoring is often proposed as a solution to the problem of successfully recruiting and retaining nursing staff. The aim of this constructivist grounded theory study was to explore Australian rural nurses' experiences of mentoring. ⋯ The problem of retaining nurses is a global issue. Experienced nurses engaged in clinical practice have the potential to cultivate and grow new or novice nurses-many already do so. Recognising this role and providing opportunities for development will help grow a positive, supportive work environment that nurtures the experienced nurses of tomorrow.