No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The study seeks to explore and to offer a critical account for the 'discursive doings' of student psychiatric nmsing practice as they are jointly constructed in the episodes of conversation between the nmse and client-speakers within the context of the communitybased psychiatric clinic. The study is built around a social constructionist framework and is concerned with the analysis of the discursive activities present within seven (7) transttibed, audio-recordings of student nurse-psychiatric client interactions. A thick and sometimes critical description of three of the contextual forces back grounding/foregrounding the discursive processes of psychiatric nursing is given. These include the public health psychiatric care context, the problem-solving approach of the undergraduate psychiatric nursing curriculum and the assumption and effects of modem psychiatric nursing theory. The first level of analysis is an aspect of the methodology and offers a descriptive and interpretive analysis of the talk in the texts. Various conversational discourse analytic tools were used here to transform talk into text and to develop the starting point for the subsequent positioning theory analysis. The second level of analysis is a positioning theory analysis of happenings within these texts. Some of the textual descriptions generated in the first level of analysis are used to illuminate and to add substance to the accounts of these positioning theory happenings. The analysis has shown that from a social constructionist positioning perspective, the unfolding nurse-client dialogue in these texts operates in four potentially distinct ways - highlighting, herding, hectoring and heeding - with specific effects for their going on together in conditions of relationship. These ways of talking are shown to be contrary to the person-eentered rhetoric of modem psychiatric nursing and more aligned with the bio-medical format of talk in helping contexts. Can these activities be dismissed as non-nursing activities? The implications for a modem psychiatric nursing theory that holds the person-centred approach to be its quintessential essence are considered and a number of ideas for how client-authorised expressions may be jointly manifest in conversations situated in this practice context are offered. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2007.

Preoperative instruction has been documented to benefit patients. With recent health care changes, most patients are now admitted to the hospital on the day of surgery. The optimal time for preoperative instruction requires re-examination. This study evaluated differences in anxiety levels of patients who received structured preoperative instruction prior to hospital admission and patients who received unstructured preoperative instruction after admission on the day of surgery.Roy's Adaptation Model guided this study. The state scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) measured anxiety in a convenience sample (n=40) admitted for same-day surgery. Participants in one group received structured preoperative instruction 1-7 days prior to surgery. Participants in a second group received unstructured preoperative instruction on the day of surgery. All participants completed the STAI 1-7 days before surgeryand on the morning of surgery. Paired t-tests on difference scores showed no significant difference in anxiety between the groups. / School of Nursing

Caring has been linked with the practice of nursing throughout history. As modern nursing strives to establish itself as a profession of caring, the need to identify the basic components of caring and how caring components are learned or transmitted has evolved. The purpose of this study was to determine if caring attitudes and behaviors were learned during the vocational educational process.Madeline Leininger's theory of caring provided the theoretical framework for this study. A comparative descriptive research design was employed. The Caring Ability Inventory (Nkongho, 1990) was used to assess a baseline for student caring and to determine any changes in the caring ability over time. The Nursing Clinical Teacher Effectiveness Inventory (Knox & Mogan, 1985) was used to establish student and faculty perceptions of caring attitudes and behaviors in the nursing faculty. A curriculum survey designed by Slevin and Harter (1987) was used to examine the nursing curriculum for various aspects of caring. Demographic data sheets were completed by students and faculty.Descriptive and multivariant statistics were used to analyze the data. The sample consisted of basic and advanced level nursing students (N = 142) and full time nursing faculty (N = 12) in a midwestern vocational nursing program. The results indicated that caring behaviors were not significantly changed during the program Faculty rated utilization of caring behaviors higher than did the students, particularly behaviors related to student evaluation. Faculty had difficulty identifying caring theory, caring concepts, and methods of teaching caring to students. The conclusion was that faculty lacked sufficient information about caring to effectively utilize the concept in curriculum presentation. / School of Nursing