Journal Club Template for Quantitative Research Article
The purpose of this assignment is to describe the research design and methodology. Please discuss the research design, the sample selection, the data collection methods, the data collection measures and/or tools, and the plans for data analysis. Please do not focus on or include the results of the study. (Use this template and make sure to support the information that you have used in the template. Each section of the template needs to be fully developed and written well in a succinct manner.)
Purpose of study:
| Research Design | The research design that was employed for this study was a Quasi-experimental pre- and post-implementation kind of design. In that data at the university hospital was collected at the initial stage, three months afterward, and 13 months later on, and then analysis of the data was conducted. The study was conducted at a hospital in a University. |
| Sample Selection | Patients that participated in the survey were those that had been at the hospital for more than 48 hours and were to be discharged from medical-surgical units in a few days’ time. Family members of patients were allowed to fill in forms for patients who were unable to complete the form by themselves. Only nurses working on the medical-surgical units at the university hospital were participating in the survey. |
| Data Collection Methods, Measures and Tools | Data for patients and nurses at the baseline stage was collected during the same period. Patients’ responses were conducted through the filling of forms, upon being returned to the researcher; they were sealed for confidentiality. On the other hand, the survey was communicated to nurses through fliers posted on the medical-surgical unit at the hospital. For the nurses, they were required to channel their responses on the link provided to them via email. The link served as a tool for data collection for the nurses.
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| Plans for Data Analysis | Data analysis involved the comparison of pre- and post-implementation responses by patients and nurses via ANOVA. However, before comparison with ANOVA, answers on the survey by family members for patients who had been unable to complete the study were filtered out. This was upon the realization that these family members might not have been around during the nurses shifting reports; thus, they may have left out the impact of the new measures that had been put in place regarding bedside nursing reports. Patient falls, and medication errors were assessed using descriptive analysis. The Dunnett T-3 post hoc comparison was also used to evaluate responses during data collection in the baseline and at 13-months post-implementation stages. Additionally, there were repeated measure comparisons conducted between the post-implementation and the baseline points of data entry for nurse overtime. For the narrative patient and nurse survey, descriptive analysis using thematic codes was used.
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| Strengths | a) Due to the operationalization of the bedside report, either through a structured or an unstructured basis, nurses perceived the report to have caused increased accountability on patients, increased patient safety, and a surge in the hindrance of safety problems amongst patients (Small & Fitzpatrick et al.,2017). b) For patients, they perceived increased involvement in shift report, enhanced communication among nurses, increased patient participation in care, and efforts to ensure that a patient was made aware of the nurse attending to him/her. In addition, the study helped in the reduction of cases of patients falls during shift changes, and this was after the implementation of the bedside report. Similarly, there was also a reduction in the number of medication errors that occurred three months after the adoption of the new system.
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| Weaknesses | a) The implementation of the new medication error reporting system interfered with data collection during the study, thus making it impossible to have a proper comparison of the medication error data. This was because the new reporting system was not conversant with the bedside report, thus the difficulty in harmonizing the processes and procedures of the two (New reporting system and the Bedside report). b) The study included only responses from patients that were set to be discharged and nurses in the medical-surgical unit, and this is deemed not to have been the full representation of patients at the hospital and the nurses as well. Furthermore, since there were no limitations put in place for the number of surveys conducted by nurses, nurses might have participated several times in the survey during the baseline period and also during the two post-implementation data collection periods.
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Reference
Sand-Jecklin, K. & Sherman, J. (2014). A quantitative assessment of patient and nursing
outcomes of bedside nursing report implementation. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 23, 2854- 2863.
Small, D.C., & Fitzpatrick, J.J. (2017). Nurse perceptions of traditional and bedside shift report. Nursing Management, 48(2), 44-49.