The article ‘Conceptualizing the Performance of Nursing Care as a Prerequisite for better Measurement: A Systematic and Interpretive Review’ by Dubois, D’Amour, Pomey, Girard, and Brault (2013) is both a non-experimental and correlational research study since it uses a theoretical-based framework to derive relationships that exist between different variables that are relevant to the performance of nursing care. The study involved a review of the literature published across three main databases, namely MEDLINE, CINAHL, and EMBASE, between 1998 and 2008. The samples were obtained after screening 2,103 papers where 101 papers were finally selected. From these, data was extracted from a detailed template and analyzed through the interpretive synthesis method where the first 31 sample papers were greatly focused on while the remaining 70 were used as reinforcements to the findings. Conceptualizations were based on three key variables, namely acquisition, deployment, and maintenance of nursing resources, the transformation of the nursing resources into quantifiable nursing services, and/or whether the patients reported positive outcomes from the nursing services. To interpret these variables, the researchers drew a systematic and reproducible methodology to identify, select, and evaluate the extracted literature to draw constructive evidence that was useful in building a conceptual framework on nursing care performance. The whole research process incorporated the following phases involved in a systematic research study: searching of literature, screening and evaluation, extraction of data, analysis, and an interpretive synthesis. The authors recommend that administrators and managers of nursing care should invest in creative ways of collecting, analyzing, and reporting data to diversify the dimensions/conceptions of nursing performance. Moreover, there is the need to incorporate other audiences during this process to maximize the process of obtaining a positive outcome (Dubois et al., 2013).
Reference List
Dubois, C., D’Amour, D., Pomey, M., Girard, F., & Brault, I. (2013). Conceptualizing performance of nursing care as a prerequisite for better measurement: a systematic and interpretive review.BMC Nurs, 12(1), 7.