Article Review: Patients’ and Nurses’ Experiences of Fundamental Nursing Care

In this systematic review and qualitative synthesis, Pentecost et al. wanted to determine how patients and nurses described their experience with fundamental nursing care regarding nutrition, elimination, mobility, and hygiene. The authors also described a search they conducted, where, in the first round, the researchers pooled 22,374 papers or articles and selected 47 papers or articles that met their criteria for inclusion in the present study (Pentecost et al., 2019). However, the majority of these studies could have been of better quality, and this is due to the fact that Gloves have been a topic of research in the last twenty years about cross-contamination, with different healthcare centers. To keep the selected studies manageable while minimizing the risk of overlooking important findings or failing to capture the essence of the authors’ concepts, the authors proceeded with synthesizing the results of only 16 ‘higher quality’ studies (Pentecost et al., 2019). Among them, the authors identified six ‘conceptually valuable’ papers that offered the greatest number of meaningful insights. The authors used a clear and sound approach to conduct the systematic review, reporting the adherence to PRISMA directives as well as using coherent methodological strategies for synthesizing the qualitative data, including the development of an initial coding scheme, examination of connections in the results, and assessment of the synthesis’s validity.

Through their synthesis, the authors identified three overarching conceptual themes influencing the quality and implementation of fundamental nursing care: effective leadership, particularly nurse leadership, relationships between patients and staff, and organizational culture. About the nurse staff, important factors focused on gaining support from the staff, enhancing the learning and proficiency of the nurses, explaining and facilitating the care responsibilities of the nurses, and promoting collaboration (Pentecost et al., 2019). With the patients, one could consider issues regarding the patient-centered approach, continuity, and proper management of patients’ expectations. Staffing and time limitations, whereas organizational policies and practices include system factors that either facilitated or hampered essential care.

The authors’ evidence indicates that delivering superior basic animate nursing care encompasses more than one dimension. Nursing comprises the right skills and knowledge of the nursing fraternity and calls for efficient leadership, partnership with the patients, and an organizational culture that encourages and supports such care. For this reason, the synthesis stresses that these wider contextual factors need to be considered for any interventions or strategies aimed at enhancing basic nursing care provision (Pentecost et al., 2019). The contributions of the authors translate to understanding the challenges surrounding the provision of basic care and the targeted interventions and studies that could be designed based on the authors’ findings.