Treading the Clinical Pathway: A Qualitative Study of Advanced Practice Nurses in a Local Health District in Australia.

Treading the Clinical Pathway: A Qualitative Study of Advanced Practice Nurses in a Local Health District in Australia.

The authors of this article analyze and discuss the concept that nurses need support to be able to plan their careers. It describes the premise for having an interest in the topic, how the data was collected, who the participants were, and finally, discusses the findings.

Introduction

To introduce the research, the authors use a few sources to establish how essential the study will be. For example, they bring up the data that suggest that unlike in the previous centuries, in the 21st Century it has become the standard for nurses to take higher degree which is illustrated by the hundreds of program set up for this specific purpose (Luck, Wilkes, and O’Baugh, 2015). Therefore, they are trying to catch the attention of the reader by describing the relevance of studying career development in nurses, and they are using supportive evidence to drive the point.

Background

In the background, the authors endeavor to show what information is available in regards to the topic and in effect to show the gaps that exist. Similarly, they explain the various roles and titles that come with advancing nursing education. Case in point, they list the roles taken up by advanced practice nurses across the USA, UK, and Australia. These roles include the clinical nurse specialist, the nurse practitioner, and the clinical nurse consultant. It further explains their duties in a healthcare setting (Luck, Wilkes, and O’Baugh, 2015). This information provides the reader with a basic understanding of the career steps involved for nurses.

Method

The authors’ choice of method was useful in ensuring the study was trustworthy. According to Schmidt and Brown (2014), qualitative studies often raise the concern of trustworthiness among the users of the information. For this reason, researchers should ensure that dependability, confirmability, credibility, and transferability are guaranteed. Through their methods, the authors of this article provided credibility by triangulation, where they asked the same questions to different participants using different ways. For instance, they used both face to face interviews and telephone interviews as well; they had 27 participants. Correspondingly, they performed an audit trail during the analysis of the interviews, which ensured dependability.

Results

One of the ways qualitative research is different from quantitative research is the use of words instead of numbers, and the data is made relevant by the use of stories and case studies (Schmidt and Brown, 2014). The authors of the article applied this concept in their research, whereby they used personal stories to explain the results they had found. For example, once they established that the three ways to moving up a career ladder for nurses had been secondment, personal application or application of an advertised position, they used the personal stories of the various nurses in their sample to illustrate (Luck, Wilkes, and O’Baugh, 2015). It is from these stories that a reader can tell that using secondment meant that some of these nurses would first ask their managers whether they would support them if they applied for a specific role and if the manager said no, they would not go through with it.

Discussion

As Schmidt and Brown (2015) explain, the best evidence-based research follows the five steps of IDP, it is in this part that the authors of the article apply step three, which is a decision. They review the results they found and summarize them to find a recurring concept, and from this, they decide as to which results support their purpose of the study.

Limitations of the Study

In this part, the authors visit one of the criteria for trustworthiness; transferability, which suggests that the data can be transferred to other contexts (Schmidt and Brown, 2015). They explain that while the findings were revealing, they were inconsistent and limited because the sample was small; hence they cannot establish that the data will be transferable in a different situation.

Conclusion and Recommendation

The article concludes by explaining what the findings mean and why it is they appeared that way. The authors stick with their premise, believing that the study was evidence, albeit not fully substantiated, that nurses do need support for career progression. In their recommendation, they suggest another survey, which should be an intervention study so that transferable concepts can be found.