Experiences of Community-Based Children's Nurses Providing Pallative Care - Essay Example

These keyword were selected so that I could focus the search on the nurses’ group who worked with children and with the community in providing palliative care. As it is the child cancer patients who are in need of community-based palliative care more than any other child patient groups, I included ‘cancer care’, and ‘onchology’ into my keyword list. I could locate many UK sources from this database but majority of articles that I found on this database were non-UK sources. There were also a limited number of post-2004 articles on this topic in this database.

The next database that I searched for articles was CINAHL. I could locate many British journals on nursing here. Internurse.com was a very useful nursing article archive that I found more user-friendly as well. In Internurse.com, I could find plenty of UK sources. Medline database was accessed by me through PubMed and became the source of many UK-sources for this study. I used CASP QUALITATIVE as my critiquing tool for this research because this tool gave me a comprehensive framework to locate my research in.

Using this tool, I could address oft-faced research issues like clarity about the aim of the research, the appropriateness of the selected methodology, effectiveness of the research design, data collection and analysis related issues, ethical concerns, and the validity of the research. Especially, the qualitative approach was relevant because this research concerns directly with the experiences of the subjects being studied and hence should be anchored in their own first person accounts of those experiences in the form of interviews.

Findings- General Overview As WHO (2003) has observed, palliative care “Improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.” (as cited in Quin et al., 2005, p.5). (WHO, 2003)Neilson, Kai, Macarthur, and Greenfield (2011) have done a community-based qualitative study in West Midlands region to investigate the experience of GPs and community-based nursing practitioners who were working with children having cancer in their homes.

The findings of this study (Neilson, Kai, Macarthur, and Greenfield, 2011) are relevant to this paper because it proved that more than the general practitioners, it were the community nurses who could play an active role in the treatment and palliative care of such children (p.551-553). Another study done by the same authors in 2010 was also located from this database which showed that community children's nurses (CCNs) and children's palliative care nurses (CPCNs) needed to be imparted further skills and knowledge regarding palliative care of children and suggested that more funds be allocated for the same (Neilson, Kai, Macarthur, and Greenfield, 2010).

This was a qualitative study that employed one-to-one interviews for data collection. Grounded theory approach was the method by which data was analysed. There was another UK-based study that I could find in this database. In this study, Beringer, Eaton and Jones (2007) have carried out a qualitative analysis of the