Friday, November 11, 2011

Academia (Research Part A)

I know a fair few of you are interested in the recent topic I brought up about nurses preforming BLS, a lot of you offered me help and guidance on twitter, which is very much appreciated.

Here is the 500ish word Part A of the assignment I submitted, for your reading pleasure.

Research Enquiry:

Part A: Identification of a problem and development of research question

The problem identified for this piece of work relates to the ability of nurses to provide effective Basic Life Support (BLS) to patients suffering an in-hospital cardiac arrest in an acute general hospital.

The reason this particular problem was chosen is that for every minute BLS is delayed the patient’s chance of survival drops by as much as 10% (Koster et al. 2010). Basic Life Support refers to maintaining airway patency and supporting breathing and circulation (Koster et al 2010), including cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). CPR refers to providing chest compressions to pump blood around the body and ventilations to breathe for the patient (Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Council 2011a). In a hospital setting staff nurses are often first on scene of a cardiac arrest and as such, their ability to perform effective CPR is essential in maximising the patient’s chance of survival. The chain of survival is a series of steps in maximising patient’s chance of survival. The steps are: 1: Early access, 2: Early CPR, 3: Early Defibrillation, 4: Early Advanced Life Support, 5: Early Post Resuscitation Care (Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Council 2011b). Nurses can implement the first two or three steps depending on training. Literature shows nurses often lack confidence in performing BLS (Kakora-Shiner 2009) and skills are not practiced nor perfected often enough (Krahn 2011). The author is a fourth year general nursing student, who has been involved in the pre-hospital emergency care as a volunteer for six years and is also an instructor involved in teaching CPR to fellow volunteers and lay persons to deal with Pre-Hospital cardiac arrests and this area is of particular interest to him.

The question that this piece of work aims to answer is:

“Are nurses trained and able to effectively perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation to patients experiencing an in-hospital cardiac arrest?”

The proposed search strategy will involve use of the authors own personal text books as well as searching a number of academic journal databases including but not limited to, CINAHL, ScienceDirect and Wiley Online Library. The keywords “Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation”, “CPR”, “Basic Life Support”, “BLS”, “Training”, “Nursing” and “Cardiac Arrest” shall be used. Articles identified in the search will be reviewed for their reference to the question; also their reference lists will be reviewed to identify applicable secondary references which may help in answering the research question.


The themes I expect to identify from the literature review are:

  • The training nurses receive in CPR and BLS
  • The measurement of the effectiveness of training nurses receive
  • CPR and BLS skills retention in nurses
  • Nurses impression of their ability and willingness to preform CPR
When I've finished part B I wont bore you with 1500 words of academic writing but will post the findings of my literary review for you reading pleasure


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