Critique of a Qualitative Nursing Study

Nursing problem addressed by this research is the level of confidence that patients in nursing homes and their family members have with respect to tests and treatments that occur in the residential nursing home rather than in a clinical or hospital setting. It is understandable that patients and family members might be concerned that the quality of care is not the same across all settings. And nursing homes are working hard to establish higher standards of care and to repair their (sometimes) tarnished reputations.

Nurses understand that the mind and body connection is very strong, and that a belief in the value of a treatment can impact the results that are experienced by that treatment. From this perspective, it is clear that nurses need to be engaged in processes that help to bolster the confidence of patients and their loved ones in the treatment plans and medical tests that they receive.

Moreover, it is important for nurses to recognize that these matters are even more important when a patient is receiving critical care, a situation when time is of the essence. Residents of nursing homes often need to undergo diagnostic tests or receive medical treatment for acute health issues. To receive these services, nursing home residents are frequently sent to the hospital, thereby incurring additional risks to their health or fiscal costs for their healthcare.

As technology becomes more available, many nursing homes are acquiring equipment that enables a number of diagnostic tests and acute health care to be accomplished at the nursing home. For nursing home patients and their families to value the complex health care that can be provided on site at the nursing home, they must believe that the care and tests are comparable to any diagnostic tests or complex health care treatments they would receive if they went to the hospital.

The article reviewed for this paper examines these issues using the treatment of pneumonia in nursing home patients as the focus medical condition (Carusone, 2006). The qualitative study by Carusone (2006) examined the perspectives of residents and family members regarding treatment for pneumonia that was or is to be carried out in the actual nursing home environment. The research question that drove this study was to learn if the treatment plan is used for pneumonia in the patients living in the home is consistent with the preferences of the nursing home residents.

Article Critique The purpose of the study and the research questions were inextricably linked, which resulted a solid research design. Qualitative methods are completely appropriate for answering the research question in this study. The researcher was interested in the feelings, perceptions, and opinions of the participants in this study; that information is most accurately acquired through qualitative methods such as surveys or in-depth interviews with the research participants. The author chose both current and early previous research to include in the literature search.

Overall, however, there was a dearth of references to other contemporary research. Although the literature review was appropriately seeded with relevant work, it seemed like a substantive weakness in the study that only a handful of works were cited. The author could easily have addressed other lines of research in her literature review, such the influence of patients' beliefs on their treatment outcomes, and the research that has been conducted using double-blind studies in which the experimental group receives a placebo, and so on.

In addition, the author was not critical of the few works that she included, and did not comment on limitations in the work. The researcher used a model for inclusion and exclusion in the program that basically served as a framework for selecting subjects. Data collection consisted of face-to-face contact with the recipients by the researcher in one-time, individual, semi-structured interviews with residents (n = 6) and family members (n = 8). The author was able to verify that a high degree of integrity.