Literature Review
The literature review team have now completed their work and a summary is provided on reviewing the evidence base, Dr Catriona Kennedy and the full version at Nursing in the community: A literature review.
A total number of 3881 papers were found by the team to meet the search criteria and a total of 154 matched the inclusion criteria of their review strategy.
A literature review usually involves a person or a team looking at a wide selection of materials that have been written about a particular subject. We usually think of 'literature' as something written on paper, but a modern literature review also looks at material that has been published on the internet and in other electronic ways like CD-Roms or even DVDs.
The team looked at how community nursing is performing in the light of Delivering for Health. They have explored how nurses in the community are helping to improve the health of the people of Scotland.
Dr Catriona Kennedy and Jane Christie from Napier University in Edinburgh will be doing the literature review along with Ishbel Rutherford from Queen Margaret UniversityCollege, Edinburgh.
For the last 14 years, Catriona has worked in Education at Queen Margaret University College, Marie Curie Cancer Care Education Department and Napier University. Prior to working in education, most of Catriona's clinical experience was as a District Nurse.
Ishbel M Rutherford - Ishbel has been qualified as a community nurse for over 20 years and has worked in community nurse education since 1986. The majority of her practice experience was in district nursing and she has continued to teach in that area. Currently she is programme leader for the BSc Community Health Nursing programme which leads to six specialist practitioner outcomes. She has taken forward course reviews and has lead programme adaptations to meet professional, policy and practice driven changes. This has given her considerable experience in working collaboratively with community based practitioners from a number of fields. She has been involved in curriculum development at undergraduate and post-graduate levels, within the institution and externally as a member of the NHS Education for Scotland (NES) panel of experts. Her academic interests focus on the development of the district nurse's role in meeting health needs for changing populations, changing roles within community nursing and the use of portfolios in learning and assessment.
Literature review terms of reference
The literature reviewers have been asked:
'Measured against the core tenets of nursing, what is the evidence within the literature that nurses working within the community contribute to:
- anticipatory care
- managing long term conditions
- managing hospital admission and discharge
- supporting unpaid carers
- reducing health inequalities
- the impact on patient outcomes when nurses use IT.
For each of these themes, are there differences for nurses working in rural, remote or urban areas?
For each of these, it will explore where on the continuum of generalist to specialist nurse the impact is most significant.'