Nursing Outcomes: The State of the Science (2nd ed.) (original) (raw)

2010, The Canadian Journal of Nursing Research Revue Canadienne De Recherche En Sciences Infirmieres

Reviewed by Virginia Lee Of the myriad possible effects of nursing care on patients, what outcomes do I include in my research study? When and how often do I need to measure those outcomes? How nursing-centric do these outcomes need to be? How clinically useful are the instruments employed to measure these outcomes? The answers to such familiar questions as these can be found in the long-overdue second edition of Diane Doran's Nursing Outcomes: The State of the Science. Eight years have passed since publication of the first edition, and the need for an update has been clear. The settings in which health care is delivered and in which nursing services are provided have shifted from predominantly inpatient hospital settings to a variety of nontraditional acute-care, community or home, and long-term-care settings. With the exponential growth in health outcomes research, there is a need to appraise new studies and take stock of new outcomes, new outcome measurements, and new evidence. The relevance of nursing outcomes research is still rooted in the imperative to investigate the impact of health human resource utilization and to determine whether nursing care is effective, and for whom, how, and in what context. The standardization of nursing-sensitive outcome concepts will allow for comparability of outcomes and for benchmarking-regionally, nationally, and globally-to identify nursing best practices and to continue with quality-improvement initiatives. Given that nurses now often work within interdisciplinary teams and contexts, nursingcentric outcomes are important for our understanding of how to use nursing resources to best effect. Thus, while the outcomes discussed in this book are not specific to nursing, all outcomes must be responsive and sensitive to nursing's interventions. Doran notes that the primary goal of this second edition is to provide an updated, comprehensive, critical analysis of the latest evidence on nursing-sensitive outcomes by reviewing the conceptual and empirical literature, and that the secondary goal is to critically review the various