Research in Nursing Generally - Coursework Example

Research in nursing generally follows a social experimental or quasi-experimental design, because while the behaviors of the patients can be monitored, it is not ethical to change the care provided by the nursing staff in such a way that would lower the quality of care received by the patients in the study (Yin, 2009). In order to fully meet the legal and ethical requirements of informed consent in research, the patients must be aware of the ways in which the change in their care impacts their health, which can also contaminate the results of the study. It becomes extremely difficult to separate the true changes in medical results from the placebo effect, or patients who had different results simply because they believed they would have different results.

However, research on anesthetized patients could avoid all of these issues. For example, if you asked the research question: “Which type of anesthetic has a longer lag between the end of surgery and the full awakening of the patient?”, you could select patients for your study that would have already been given different types of anesthetic already. Alternatively, you could select patients and medications such that the change of anesthetic would not greatly impact the safety of the patient and could therefore be ethically switched for the point of the research. It is unlikely such research would be contaminated by the informed consent of the patients, as they cannot “will” themselves awake from surgery any earlier, and would be unlikely to want to do so anyway. They would have no connection with the anesthetic administered and so have no desire to change the results of the medication on their bodies, unlike with a curative or analgesic medication which they would want to work and so might say that the effects were stronger due to a placebo effect.