Nurses' Attitudes Towards Patients on Medicinal Use of Marijuana

¶ … Attitudes Towards Medical Marijuana The main purpose of the study will be to assess nurses' feelings and perceptions of patients who use medical marijuana for pain management. This will predominantly give light to the way the professionals who prescribe and supervise the use of marijuana think of the people they attend to on a regular basis. The research will be seeking to establish the perception created in the minds of the nurses and how this affects their reaction and handling of the patients who use marijuana for pain management.

With the attitudes established, it will be fundamental in forecasting whether the use of medical marijuana will in the future have a positive reception and acceptance within the society or not. Research question The research question that will guide the formulation of this study will therefore be 'What are nurses perception/attitude towards patients using medical marijuana for pain management?' Method of study In the context of this paper, the research will adopt the qualitative approach where the Phenomenology.

This will help in the study of the consciousness of the nurses and the self-awareness as that the nurses undergo as the idea of using marijuana takes root in the medical field. Since Phenomenology basically deals in the study of the self-consciousness and self-awareness through the first person point-of-view (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014), the study will give the researchers the chance to experience first hand the changes that the nurses undergo over time in acceptance or rejection of the patients using marijuana for medicinal purposes.

The phenomenology as a qualitative approach will also give the researchers the chance to ask questions and get the perspective of the nurses through the answers they will be giving.

The researchers will also form an interactive bond with the subject as the easiest way to the conscious of the nurses and the approach will also give the searchers the opportunity to interact with the targeted nurses on a daily basis as they go through their chores at home during the off duty sessions and in effect learn their attitudes and perceptions concerning the patients. These are milestones that cannot be easily achieved through the quantitative approaches.

Population sample The sample population will be sourced from nurses across different specialties so as to get a balanced attitude from varying backgrounds. There will be 15 nurses will be engaged in both interview and questionnaire filling. The nurses who will participate in the research will have to be on off duty for a reasonable duration within which they will be able to successfully answer the questions in the questionnaire.

There will be a provision for additional number of nurses to be engaged in the research if the 15 initial number shall not reach the data saturation point and their responses deemed to have provided sufficient data such that no more new information is forth coming.

The inclusion criteria that will be employed in selecting the population sample is that the participant must be a RN, he must be off duty at the time of participation, he must be working or have worked with at least more that 5 patients who use marijuana as a pain management drug. The participants must have been in the nursing practice for at least 2 years to qualify for the research study participation.

The exclusion criteria are such that is the individual uses marijuana for whatever purpose, then he is excluded from the sample, if the nurse comes from a nuclear family that has a member using marijuana for medicinal or otherwise purpose then he cannot participate, if the nurse has a strong religious persuasion that may influence the attitude towards marijuana users then he cannot participate. The recruitment of the participants will be conducted from three targeted health facilities with a target of getting at least five participants from each facility.

The communication will be directed to the public relations or front office personnel who will in turn officially inform the nurses of the research and the volunteer nurses will directly contact the researcher and schedule an appropriate time and venue for the interview for those who shall have met the criteria. The sampling method will be a random sampling approach which will give the researchers a balanced and objective population.

This random sampling will be achieved through collection of several names of those who shall have qualified through the inclusion and exclusion criteria, then the names written in folded papers will be picked at random by five members of the research team. The five participants will then be contacted for confirmation of their willingness to continue with the research. If they choose to back out of the research, then a replacement name will be randomly picked from the pool.

Research design and data collection methods The research, as aforementioned will include RNs from varied specialties who will be out on off duty at the time they will be participating in the research. The two main data collection methods/tools will be the use of interviews and questionnaires.

There will be scheduled interview where the researcher will have an interview schedule that will be guiding the interview after which he will have to administer the questionnaire and ask the participant for the time duration that would be comfortable for them to duly fill in the questionnaire and return it. The questionnaires will have 10 questions in them for ease of answering since many questions would discourage the participant who is off duty and wants to relax from accurately answering the many questions.

Since it is the personal attitudes that are being studied here, the questionnaires will be open ended to tap into the thoughts and conscious of the participants as such questions will give him the chance to write down what he feels like and.