Introduction
As nurses and midwives, we must continually update ourselves professionally so that our practice is underpinned by the best knowledge available. To write meaningfully about a topic, you need to be able to identify the right sources of information and to review these in a systematic, organized and purposeful way. You can draw on many different information sources to inform your assignment preparation, including journal articles, books and research reports – available in libraries and from electronic sources – and expert opinion.
Information-seeking skills need to be learned and practised. Being able to evaluate what you read in journals, books and on the internet is fundamental to knowledge-based practice. Having read and worked through the activities in this chapter, you should be able to take appropriate notes and make decisions about the relevance and usefulness of different information sources.
The information-seeking principles we discuss apply to all types of assignments – essays, case studies, reports, dissertations or reflections on practice.
Preparation
It is important to start collecting information for assignments early. If you leave your preparation to the last minute, you will reduce your opportunities to secure the most appropriate information from the widest range of sources. Many web and intranet sites now offer full-text journal articles and research reports but often these require you to be registered with the appropriate company and/or to pay to download them. In 2008, a full-text article from the Journal of Advanced Nursing cost £30, although your higher education institution’s (HEI) library and/or your professional association’s library may offer some full-text journals online for free. Your placement organization or employer may have access too. Planning your time carefully and finding out about – and making the best use of – your local library facilities should be part of your preparation.
• Find out the opening times of the libraries that you will need to use. Remember that libraries may be closed or have reduced opening hours during holiday times. Most libraries allow free or cheap access to the internet but such sessions often have to be booked in advance.
• Find out which range of online journals your HEI subscribes to. You can search them by using the library catalogue. Most HEIs subscribe to Athens, which allows you to access full-text articles. This will require you to have a password and your course provider will provide you with details on how to access these systems.
• Identify how long you will allow yourself for getting together resources, how long for reading and how long for writing and editing. It is often tempting to be completely caught up in reading and gathering together more and more resources. Be sure to leave yourself time to actually read all the information you have collected properly and to write the assignment.
Making the best use of your resources
It is always worth taking some time to identify the most appropriate and relevant resources (see Chapter 3 for more details). Such resources should also include people who have a particular expertise in the area, or with whom it would be useful to talk through your ideas. For example, if you are working on an essay about the nursing care of a patient with diabetes, it might be useful to talk through your ideas with a patient who has this problem, a representative of an interest group such Diabetes UK and/or the local diabetes nurse specialist. If you are writing on a professional issue such as accountability and midwifery practice then you might find it helpful to seek the perspective of the Supervisor of Midwives in your practice area, and to contact the Nursing and Midwifery Council and/or your professional association/trade union. If there are several of you all working on a similar topic or area, it might be helpful to share information-seeking strategies, pool your resources and try out your ideas on each other. Also, if you collaborate in this way you will not have to spend so much time individually in the library searching the literature, surfing the internet and photocopying articles.
Remember that your mentor and the other members of the team you are working in are important sources of information and ideas regarding resources available locally.
Remember that your mentor and the other members of the team you are working in are important sources of information and ideas regarding resources available locally.Planning
It is important to spend time thinking about your assignment before you start your literature search, and to talk to your patient/client if it is a case study. This thinking should involve clarifying the topic, jotting down your thoughts and listing all the questions and issues that occur to you. This type of approach should ensure that your reading becomes purposeful. It is crucial to focus on exactly what the assignment requires. It is often tempting to read things just because they are interesting rather than because you are absolutely clear that they are relevant. Equally, if you are not sure of your focus you may waste time going off on tangents and getting together loads of material that you do not end up using (see Chapter 5 for further tips and hints).
Imagine you have been asked to write a case study that demonstrates your understanding of theories of psychosocial development and their use in assessing the problems of a child within their family context and identifying appropriate interventions. Note down the key issues you would wish to include.
Imagine you have been asked to write a case study that demonstrates your understanding of theories of psychosocial development and their use in assessing the problems of a child within their family context and identifying appropriate interventions. Note down the key issues you would wish to include.Your list might look something like this:
■ Introduce Amy and her family. Explain your role in relation to Amy and her family. Explain why you have chosen to focus on them for this particular case study.
■ Use a genogram to help explain Amy’s family structure, the subsystems within her family, and the strength of relationships between different family members.
■ Describe Amy’s stage of psychosocial development, using Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development.
■ Use Carter and McGoldrick’s (2005) family life-cycle stages to consider the family’s current life-cycle stage(s).
■ Use the Calgary Family Assessment Model (Wright and Leahey, 2001) to assess family functioning and to highlight family strengths and difficulties.
■ Use evidence from your observations of and interactions with Amy and her family to support your assessment.
■ Describe the key factors that have influenced the development of the presenting problem. Summarize the problem(s) as you now understand them (backing this up with relevant literature).
■ Reflect on the appropriateness and effectiveness of interventions that you and other members of the multidisciplinary team were involved in implementing as part of your role with Amy and her family.
Information-seeking skills
Collecting material and resources for your assignment involves being systematic and organized. It is vital to record accurate details of what you are reading, however time consuming or irritating this may seem initially. When carrying out literature searches it is particularly important to note down the full reference, including the year of publication and the name and place of the publisher. In edited books it is necessary to record the names of the editors and the names of the authors, page numbers and titles of the individual chapters you wish to refer to. Some journals unfortunately do not include the details such as year of publication and volume and issue numbers on every page. Unless you write these on the copy of the article at the time, even though you have a photocopy of the article, you may waste valuable time finding these details again later.
Recording references
You should record each book, chapter, article and report that you read. The best way of recording and storing this type of information is by using a software package such as Reference Manager or EndNote. These allow you to type in details as you go, to insert references into the text of your assignment and to create a list of your references – in the style required by your education institution – either as a separate document or added to the end of your assignment. Most will also allow you to save references you have found on the internet. The end result is your own database of sources, which will provide a useful resource for life-long learning. Taking time to learn how to do use this type of software is extremely worthwhile (see Chapter 4 for a further discussion). For example, the information that should be recorded for a book is:
Andrew S 2008 Mixed methods research for nursing and the health sciences. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford
For a journal article:
Lakeman R, Fitzgerald M 2008 How people live with or get over being suicidal: a review of qualitative studies. Journal of Advanced Nursing 64(2):114–126
For a chapter in an edited book:
Bennett J 2008 Supporting recovery: medication management in mental health care. In JE Lynch, S Trenoweth (eds) Contemporary issues in mental health nursing. Wiley, Chichester, pp 117–132
And for an internet resource:
Care Services Improvement Partnership (CSIP) and Valuing People Support Team (2008) Resources. Online. Available: http://valuingpeople.gov.uk/dynamic/valuingpeople59.jsp [last accessed 29 September 2008]
Some parts of the generic format are not always applicable to all electronic publications. With paper-based resources, it is often useful to note down where the reference is kept. For example, did it come from a particular library or did you borrow it from someone? Noting down the class number and accession number can also help speed things up if you need to find the same reference again. If you are using electronic resources be sure to note down the full internet/intranet address so that you can locate the reference again should you need to. The subject matter of the reference should be noted too, along with the key points of argument or information it contains.
For example, if you were writing an essay about disability and pregnancy, a useful reference, which you might come across in your literature search, is McKay-Moffatt (2008) Disability in pregnancy and childbirth. Churchill Livingstone/Elsevier, Oxford. Your card on McKay-Moffat (2008) might look something like this:
Seems to be the only book on the subject. Notes that although an increasing number of women with disabilities are having children, their needs are not always effectively met. Explores the social construction of disability and motherhood. Offers some case-based material of the experiences of women with physical and/or learning disabilities using maternity services. Suggests how accessibility can be improved with appropriate signage, equipment and use of height-adjustable beds, cots and incubators, etc. Discusses how midwives’ skills, knowledge and attitudes towards disability impact. Stresses the importance of the advocacy role of the midwife and the need for the midwife to liaise with other health professionals to ensure that women with disabilities receive appropriate care throughout pregnancy.
A review of research into the use of complementary therapies for symptom control in cancer nursing might lead you to the 2008 article in Cancer Nursing ‘Reflexology for symptom relief in patients with cancer’ by Wilkinson et al. The notes section in your Reference Manager entry might look like this:
A systematic review – using Cochrane principles – which examines the research evidence base for the effectiveness of reflexology in cancer care. It aimed to identify whether reflexology:
Concluded that because of the paucity of data in the five trials, no firm conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of reflexology for the relief of cancer treatment symptoms and comorbidities.
– reduced physical symptoms such as pain, nausea, fatigue, andconstipation
– reduced psychological symptoms such as anxiety, and
– improved quality of life and produced any unwanted adverseeffects.
It is helpful to note down any direct quotes that you may want to use. For example, on page 359, Wilkinson et al. note that:
The fact that there were no positive differences in favour of reflexology between sham and authentic reflexology is attributed to the non-specific effects of the intervention with both groups of patients benefiting from the opportunity to discuss their concerns and fears. The studies which showed that patients benefited almost as much or more from non-specific foot massage when provided by trained reflexologists than from genuine reflexology raise important questions about non-specific effects (common to all practitioner-based complementary therapies) about the active ingredient in reflexology and the relative cost-effectiveness of the use of trained reflexologists; these findings were not dependent on sample size or methodological quality.
The key is being succinct but informative. You might find it helpful to keep the question and your initial brainstormed plan close to you while you are reading to make sure that you extract only relevant information and do not get completely snowed under with notes.
The internet
The internet consists of millions of magazine-style pages containing text and images, plus multimedia elements such as sound samples, animations, video clips and learning objects. Most institutions and many individuals now have websites. Educational institutions provide information about their courses and often a range of interactive learning materials and resources, discussion boards and learning objects to guide reflection. You can access online bibliographic databases such as CINAHL, MEDLINE, the Midwives Information and Resource Service (MIDIRS), the British Nursing Index (BNI) and Athens. Some of these require you or your institution to be registered and can only be accessed using a password. There are also news services provided by organizations such as the BBC and CNN, online newspapers, such as The Guardian and The Times. Professional magazines such as the Nursing Standard and Nursing Times
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