DOI: 10.1097/NCQ.0b013e3181a34130

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PMID: 19525758

Issn Print: 1057-3631

Publication Date: 2009/07/01


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Awareness of Dying Revisited

Tom Andrews; Alvita K. Nathaniel

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Excerpt

GROUNDED THEORIES are powerful tools that nurses can use to improve nursing care quality.1 Specially trained researchers derive grounded theories from observations and conceptualizations of real-world happenings. Because of this real-world orientation, grounded theories are particularly appropriate for nursing research. Grounded theories can offer clear understandings of predictable processes and patterns of behavior. When nurses better understand patterns that negatively affect patients, they can work toward altering them to improve the quality of patient care. In a 2007 article titled “How Grounded Theory Can Improve Nursing Care Quality,” we demonstrated how grounded theories can help nurses understand that certain patterns always seem to emerge, that particular people respond in predictable ways, and that actions produce predictable results.1 We offered 2 distinct grounded theories, Visualizing Deteriorating Conditions2 and Moral Reckoning in Nursing.3 The implications of these recently developed theories demonstrate how nurses can influence mortality and morbidity by facilitating the early detection of physiological deterioration and how nurses can make consistent and rational moral judgments in the midst of situational binds. Each of these theories seeks to give nurses more control in situations of uncertainty by helping them understand what they are facing through explanation and by suggesting strategies that they can use to deal much more effectively with uncertainties.
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