African Americans and Review

¶ … Abbott's "Evaluations of nursing interventions designed to impact knowledge, behaviors, and health outcomes for rural African-Americans: An integrative review." The cultural group that is the focus of this article is African-Americans. There are several factors that influenced my decision to review an article about this particular cultural group. Foremost among these is the movement towards precise medicine that is currently impacting the healthcare landscape.

This movement was begat by the current president and is attempting to implement healthcare at a personalized, individual level in which historically underrepresented groups can have treatment and diagnoses pertinent to them. African-Americans are an excellent example of one of the groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in healthcare data. Thus, I was largely moved to study an article pertaining to treatment factors for this group as an example of the targeted health care plans of the Precision Medicine Initiative launched by the White House.

One of the key points of the article I analyzed is the fact that it does not contain original research. Instead, the author merely conducted a literary review of interventions pertaining to African-Americans. This fact is an important one because it allows the author to access much more data than she likely could have while conducting independent research. In fact, the author scrutinized several scholarly articles from 2004 to 2014 that detailed health interventions for African-Americans. As such, this article encompasses data from an extremely wide variety of sources.

It is always pivotal to utilize enough data from which to draw conclusions or findings. By choosing to synthesize and review literature pertaining to this topic, the author was able to achieve that objective. Another critical point upon which Abbott's article is based is that she was evaluating interventions for specific maladies. This point is so important because it would be extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to provide a comprehensive list of healthcare issues or afflictions that were affecting African-Americans in massive quantities.

Instead, the author chose to hone in on a few key maladies that are somewhat eminent due to their impact upon this community (and to others, as well). Specifically, Abbott was conducting a literature review regarding interventions for this patient population as it pertained to cardiovascular disease, cancer and stroke. The prominence of these conditions in her research is underscored by the fact that in far too many cases, these medical conditions can produce fatal results for patients.

Thus, it was important for the author to detail interventions related to this condition because they oftentimes involve matters of life or death. From a slightly more practical standpoint, it is vital to understand the fact that by simply conducting a literary review pertaining to these three conditions, the author could not only gather sheer amounts of data required to inform her research, but also refrain from getting overwhelmed by it.

The foregoing paragraph largely addressed the sample of articles upon which Abbott based her article; this one will address the actual study design she deployed. The author chose to utilize "an integrative review method" which she based on relevant criteria for the articles she selected. The most eminent of those criteria is that the articles had to pertain to the subjects of her article and the three previously mentioned condition. Of particular note is the fact that the author's review method was integrative.

When reviewing the massive quantities of articles pertaining to her population during the previously mentioned 10-year period, the author was sure to encounter research that utilized varying (if not outright conflicting) methods and approaches to research. Still, she could account for all these inconsistencies so that she could "evaluate, analyze and synthesize" (Abbott, 2015, p. 408) them via her integrative review method. Furthermore, the author was able to glean more insight from this integrative review method by systematically parsing through them to get detailed results.

Via the incorporation of a literary matrix she was able to ascertain the most notable factors of the different research articles she had integrated, which allowed her to draw conclusions from them. The correlation between the author's results and the implications for nursing were extremely significant. The primary finding of the author's literature review is that nurses can greatly impact the overall health and wellness of the previously mentioned patient population in relation to the aforementioned three conditions.

Some of the articles that were analyzed pertained to preventative measures that were deployed with varying degree of efficacy. Still, nurses can play a major role in ensuring that such interventions actually work and affect the target population in an advantageous way. The specific roles that nurses had in this regard varied. In some instances, they were described as "presenters and leaders" (Abbott, 2015, p. 411), they were alternately described as "project team members" (Abbott, 2015, p. 411) and teachers.

Regardless of those roles, the literary review demonstrated a substantial amount of efficacy in what were actually fairly standard interventions for these diseases by focusing on "education and cultural tailoring" (Abbott, 2015, p. 419) of the intervention. Applying this newly learned information to a practical situation that demonstrates cultural sensitivity is an important way of gauging this author's understanding of those concepts. One of the most important lessons learned from Abbott's article is the value attributed to cultural tailoring.

Thus, when attempting to practice cardiovascular care in a rural environment in which the vast majority of the patients are African-American, it is important to shape one's advice in a way that is immediately accessible to this population group. In doing so, it is prudent to conduct research that specifically pertains to this group. Instead of informing patients of general statistics.