Nursing Today: Transition and Trends - Essay Example

"Nursing Today: Transition and Trends" is a great example of a paper on care. Research utilization has persisted as a field of interest in the nursing profession with hundreds of smaller projects, conceptual and opinion pieces that have been generated. In all these literature authors; without fail have encouraged clinicians to use research. A general consensus has been reached that the theory-practice problem which is in fact a widening gap between research and practice persists. Preliminary searches on this topic did not uncover non-English papers. They are three kinds of influences on research; individual, organizational, and innovation. It is evident that in order to design interventions that will increase research use in nursing, it is necessary to have an understanding of what influences research use. These are individual determinants which are;

• Age
• Sex
• Education
• Family income
• Research beliefs
• Research attitudes involvement in research activities
• Type of education

 The study identifies various predictors which affect research and are extracted into six categories;

• Beliefs and attitudes with which attitude towards research is the most frequently assessed determinant.
• Involvement in research activities.
• Information seeking
• Education
• Professional characteristics
• Other socio-economic factors include marital status, income, gender, and lifestyle activities.

From the results, however, the manner in which these individual factors may interact with each other to influence research utilization in nursing is completely unknown, although there is a positive relationship between beliefs and attitudes and increased research utilization. Further research should be carried out in this field of nursing. The research should be conducted to provide more knowledge about individual determinants that can not be varied such as age, sex, and education. The main challenge faced by the researchers; the reason as to why nursing has not progressed is that nursing is not treated as a theoretically rich area. Further research should be carried out programmatically including interdisciplinary scholars in order to create a strong theoretical body of works relevant to nursing and related medical disciplines.

This will be helpful to address important concepts and gaining a comprehensive understanding of multiple factors that influence the use of research. The research committee should also consider supporting scholars with interesting studies and including their papers as part of research in the nursing field.

From the findings, as a nurse, I need to do further research before deciding on which intervention I should use and also involve other health disciplines in dealing with medical problems. The study has really challenged me in that it suggests that nursing should be taken as a theoretically rich area that should be intertwined with other disciplines.

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