Qualitative Article Critique Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Qualitative Article Critique - Essay Example 2718). b. Research Problem As the topic of the journal article clearly suggests, it is very important for nurses to acquire excellent skills regarding the understanding of the patients’ problems and devising solutions to counter those problems. Many researchers (e.g. Hardy & Smith 2008; Pardue 1987; Mattingly 1991) have studied the importance of clinical judgments and have found that clinical decision making is becoming a significant part of today’s health care. Thompson et al. (2004), in their research, also affirm that the nurses’ â€Å"decisions have important implications for patient outcomes†. How clinicians process patients’ and their diseases’ information while giving serious consideration to psychosocial issues is the research problem the author has brought forward. According to him, the â€Å"current theoretical explanations of clinical judgement† are â€Å"incomplete† (p. 2711) because these do not talk about the psych osocial issues that should be involved in clinical treatment. Since, past research has only focused on decision making for acute care hospital settings; hence, there was much need for a research that talked about clinical judgments from outpatient perspective where clinicians and patients both participate in the decision making process. The author has come up with a grounded theory study that suggests mutual intacting which involves such strategies that the health practitioners used in decision making while enabling the patients to actively engage in the process. This also helped improve the relationship between the practitioners and their patients. The problem statement very well goes with the title the author has suggested and has good scholastic importance. The problem can be well understood by an average reader and the research is not limited to the author’s own aptitudes and ideas. The abstract provides a brief but compact summary of the research and gives a good overvie w of the research’s aim, background, method, findings and conclusion. c. Research Questions/Hypotheses This research sought to test the hypothesis about how much important is the decision making ability or clinical judgment for nurses who are working at advanced clinical level in chronic and acute care outpatient contexts. The hypothesis was testable and explained the problem surely well by simultaneously giving significance to physician-patient relationship which the author referred to as psychosocial issues often ignored in the past literature. The author’s main research question was- what practice strategies are being and should be used by the practitioners to assist eliciting patient information and deciding on treatment interventions? What were the clinicians’ main concerns when making clinical judgements for the patient? and how did they resolve those concerns? 2. Review of the Literature The author has given an extensive review of literature citing other researchers’ works and explaining them in order to support the need to conduct this specific research. He has cited many researches which discuss the importance of clinical judgment in acute care hospitals or for critical care. The research works in this manner studied by the author came from Lajoie et al. (1998), Cioffi (2001), McCaughan et al. (2002), Bucknall (2003), Hoffman et al. (2004), Hancock & Easen (2006). The author has mentioned the work by Lauri & Salantara (1998) who conducted an empirical research and