Advance Care Planning in Palliative Care

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Introduction
The purpose of this report is to compare and contrast two different nursing research articles. The report will critique and evaluate two qualitative studies, one being an original research report and the second being a review paper. The scope of comparison and contrast will include research design, theories or conceptual models, how the research was conducted, analysis and reporting of research data, usefulness of the research, and a conclusion.
Selection of Research Interest Area
The first journal article is about advance care planning (ACP) in palliative care. This is of interest due to several clinical experiences and the realization that many families either ignore the patient’s request for end of life (EOL) care or who have no idea of how to plan for EOL care. By reading the research and understanding the methods used, this will allow for insight into how to implement palliative care into clinical practice across different sites. The authors of this original research are Jeanine Blackford PhD, RN, senior lecturer at La Trobe University in Australia, and Annette Street PhD, associate dean of research and professor of cancer and palliative care studies. According to Blackford & Street (2011), this research is important as there are many countries that “report a low percentage of people who have completed an advance care plan” (p. 2022), and ACP is needed upon admission to facilities that offer palliative care. In addition, the purpose of the study is to try and obtain guidance to integrate an ACP model into routine clinical practice in the community. The research question chosen for the analysis of this article is: Is it feasible to implement ACP into routine practice and documentation at multi-site locations in...

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...audited their search results. Agreement on the findings in the studies was obtained through consensus. Houser (2012), states that studies such as this which review multiple studies “compensate for many threats to internal validity” (p. 268). Duggleby et al. (2012), admits that there were limitations as the metasynthesis of the studies included the authors assumptions which is not actual data. In addition, the report admitted that the search results contained findings based on multiple fatal illnesses and the understanding of hope might be different if it had included people with non-fatal illnesses. Houser (2012) would consider this a threat to the internal validity as there is bias involved with the author’s assumptions and the selection of only people with fatal chronic illnesses. There was no indication of any ethical violations in the meta-synthesis review.

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