Smoking amongst young adults.
Contemporary nursing report (3000 words)
Artefact 1 requires you to identify and explore a contemporary problem in public health, review the literature relevant to the problem and provide recommendations for clinical practice or organization development. You are expected to write at the required level 6 standard, which includes supporting your ideas with academic references, and offering a critical analysis and synthesis of the evidence base relevant to your contemporary problem.
The report should fully discuss the contemporary nursing problem that you have identified and articulate the root causes contributing to the problem. You should present your methodology for searching the academic literature in a systematic way, the results of the papers that have been retrieved and a discussion of how the findings have informed your recommendations for clinical practice and organizational development.
Although you can decide on the layout and structure of your project report, I recommend that you follow the structure below. This structure allows you to meet the marking criteria and ensures clarity. You can choose a different structure as long as you meet the requirements of the marking rubric. You are expected to make good use of tables, diagrams, charts, text boxes and images in the main text of your report. These are not included in the word count of the assignment but will be marked. You should also make use of subheadings to provide clarity to your work. You are not expected to include appendices, unless you wish to include information which is not your own work to add context or clarity to your report. The total word count for this assignment is 3000 words.
The following is a suggested structure for your report. There are suggested word counts for each section in brackets.
Title
The title of your report should accurately reflect your contemporary nursing problem. Examples of suitable titles: ‘The health impact of obesity in the United Kingdom’ or ‘Weight loss conversations between overweight patients and nurses.’
Abstract (250-300 words)
Provide a brief summary of the contents of the report. It’s worth writing this last, when you know the key points of your assignment. Remember the abstract is designed to provide a brief snapshot of your report. It should be no more than 300 words.
Key Sections:
• Background
• Methods
• Findings
• Conclusion and Recommendations
Smoking amongst young adults.
Introduction (600 words)
Why is this a problem? How big is the problem? What is the impact of the problem?
You should start by introducing the contemporary problem you are interested in studying and explain why this is a concern. In addition to this, you should link the contemporary nursing problem to previous placements or clinical observations. For example, you have observed an increased number of patients with obesity in clinical practice or you have provided care to patients with alcohol/substance misuse, and you decide to investigate this further. You may want to understand the root causes of this, you may want to understand the factors that led to alcohol misuse (social determinants of health, for example) or you may want to understand the overall health, social and economic impact of alcohol/substance misuse in the United Kingdom.
You should clearly articulate why the contemporary problem is an issue, whilst supporting your ideas with academic references. You may want to reference clinical or professional guidelines, policies or standard operating procedures (SOPs) that you feel care is not aligned with.
You should end your introduction with an overall aim for your literature review.
Literature review (1700 words)
It is important to undertake a literature review to understand the evidence for care in the context of the contemporary problem you have selected. The literature review should explore the problem in detail and offer potential solutions/recommendations to the problem. For example, if you would like to understand the health impact of alcohol misuse in teenagers, you could also explore the recommendations suggested by the literature on how to minimize/limit its impact. It may be that public health campaigns need to target a specific population group and increase the use of social media to reach teenagers. Guidance on how to carry out a literature review can be sought from myself.
In the literature review, you can include original research, systematic reviews, and non-research publications in your literature review.
Search methodology: what did you do to find the papers you will review?
This section should clearly document your approach to finding the relevant literature in a way that someone else could take your strategy and retrieve the same papers. You may need to do several searches in order to fully understand the context of the problem.
You should clearly present the key terms, Boolean operators, wildcards and truncation used; define the inclusion and exclusion criteria (methodology, publication year, translations, international studies etc.) and provide a justification for these, with the support of academic references, where appropriate.
You should clearly explain and justify the search strategy, including the databases that you used to search the literature (for example, CINAHL, PsycINFO, MEDLINE, PubMed, Cochrane, etc.). If you decided to include grey literature, you should also describe a search strategy.
You should record the number of results you gained at each stage of your search and should present these figures using a PRISMA flow diagram such as this (Moher, Liberati,
Tetzlaff & Altman, 2009).
Findings: what did you find?
In this section, you will describe the papers you have found in your search and their findings. The optimum number of papers for this review is 5-8 papers. You may wish to consider presenting a summary of studies table within the main text of your report. In addition to this table, you should offer a synthesis of the papers you have read, by bringing together the key themes generated from the different papers (often called thematic analysis). This approach will allow you to capture and summarise relevant information to your contemporary problem.
In this section, you should only present the findings from the papers included in the review. You will be able to discuss the findings and use more literature in the next section –
Discussion.
Discussion: What do the findings mean?
In this chapter, you should think critically about the research findings of the literature review (chapter described above). Please consider the following questions as a way to guide and prompt your discussion: What do these findings mean? What are the implications of the findings to clinical practice? How do the research findings compare to clinical practice and/or policy and guidelines? Are they aligned with clinical practice? Is clinical practice aligned with up-to-date policy and guidelines? What is the impact of current clinical practice in the care of patients/service users? What strategies or recommendations have been made to improve current clinical practice?
You do not need to answer all of these questions, but you need to demonstrate that you have critically thought about your research findings.
In addition, it is expected that you consider the strengths and limitations of the included papers, and the limitations of your literature search. I suggest that you dedicate around 2 paragraphs to each part – one paragraph to the limitations of the papers and another paragraph to the limitations of the search strategy. You should also provide the limitations for individual papers in a separate table or in the summary of studies table.
You could use a critical appraisal tool to support you, e.g. Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP; 2019). If you are using a CASP checklist, you should ensure that you select the most appropriate one for each paper.
Conclusion and recommendations (400 words)
The conclusion sets out what inferences you draw from the information. Ensure the main premises or issues are summarised in a meaningful way. For example, you may say that “The literature review suggested that obesity remains an area of concern in the UK, with deprivation and the surrounding environment being the most common cause…” In addition, you should also consider whether you have met all objectives.
Lastly, you should provide clear recommendations for clinical practice or organisational development, and ensure these are realistic and specific. These recommendations should be linked to research evidence, relevant to your contemporary nursing problem and be based on public health approaches and theory.
