Mental health nursing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Mental health nursing - Essay Example Understanding is most often than not can be achieved in careful study and research of behaviours, patterns, beliefs, among other prevalent practices and knowledge in the nursing and health care relations and practices. Likewise, it is very critical for every health care studies and research to adhere to scientific, systematic process as can be achieved through objective measurement, through the imposition of control in order to be able to describe, explore and explain (Playle, 1999) the nature of the subject matter under investigation. Benton and Cormack (2000) have been very instrumental in defining a format for the method of mental health research issues as they have designed it to identify strengths and weaknesses of every study for inclusion, assessed, and careful consideration allows that the more ambiguity there will be and hence greater care needed in drawing conclusions from the paper. The framework they have presented have always been used in most instances to help the process of critiquing as it is a comprehensive framework covering most points needed in the critiquing process. The framework may be applied to both qualitative and quantitative research but without very clear research questions or objectives, a study cannot progress in a systematic and efficient manner so that the researcher must have established a specific purpose for the study, thereby allowing decisions to be made about methods and resources, and ethical issues will be identified. Playle (1999) likewise pointed out that identification of the overall nature of research will lead to examination of more depth the two stages of the research process which are the development of research questions and establishing current knowledge through awareness of existing literatures. Cormack and Benton (2000) insisted that without very clear research questions or objectives, a study cannot progress in a systematic and efficient manner. Burns and Grove (1997) specified that much time is spent in narrowing down a broad area of interest although many research or studies have very specific questions, objectives and hypothesis. Still, clear purpose must be provided to guide the research process (Burns and Grove, 1997). DISCUSSION: With a premise that little evidence exists to indicate that community psychiatric nurses can achieve the results reported by expert cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), a study conducted by Turkington, et al (2000) aimed to "assess the effectiveness and safety of a brief cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) intervention in a representative community sample of patients with schizophrenia in secondary care settings." The study used the method of pragmatic randomized trial performed involving 422 patients and carers to compare a brief CBT intervention against treatment as usual and the results showed that "patients who received CBT (n=257) improved in overall symptomatology (P=0.015; number needed to treat [NNT]=13), insight (P