Supporting care receivers in Activities of Daily Living (ADL), irrespective of diagnosis, setting, or cultural background, lies at the heart of fundamental nursing care. The pursuit of quality ADL care becomes increasingly challenging with the changing complexity of care needs. ADL care delivery is often undervalued and is considered a low-status task despite its crucial importance to care receivers. This study aims to synthesize challenges in ADL care irrespective of the care setting.
In the mixed qualitative methods study, we used expert panel consultations, world café sessions, and a rapid literature review. For data analysis, we simultaneously analyzed the three data sets using inductive and deductive inquiry.
We identified four challenges and their corresponding subthemes. They are (1) Undervalued common-sense work versus complex, high-skilled care provision; (2) Limitations in professional reflective clinical decision-making; (3) Missed opportunities for shared ADL decisions; and (4) Meeting ADL care needs in a high-throughput system.
These challenges reveal the complexity of ADL care and how its paradoxical narrative relates to the conditions in which nursing professionals struggle to create opportunities, for reflective clinical reasoning and shared ADL decisions, by facing organizational and environmental barriers.
This study is relevant to nursing professionals, care organizations, policymakers, and researchers aiming to improve ADL care and provide insights into challenges in ADL care. This study forms the starting point for a changing narrative on ADL nursing care and subsequent quality improvements in the form of, for example, guidelines for nursing professionals.
Women with complex health needs are more at risk of having children’s social care involvement with their newborns than other mothers. Around the time of pregnancy, there are opportunities for health services to support women with these needs and mitigate the risk of mother–baby separation. Yet little is known about healthcare professionals’ experiences of providing this support.
We administered an online survey to perinatal healthcare professionals across England (n=70 responders), including midwives, obstetricians, perinatal psychologists/psychiatrists and health visitors. We asked about their experiences of providing care for pregnant women with chronic physical conditions, mental health needs, intellectual/developmental disabilities and substance use disorders, who might be at risk of children’s social care involvement. We conducted a framework analysis.
We constructed five themes from participant data. These include (1) inaccessible healthcare for women with complex needs, (2) the challenges and importance of restoring trust, (3) services focusing on individuals, not families, (4) the necessity and caution around multidisciplinary support and (5) underfunded services inhibiting good practice.
Women who are at risk of children’s social care involvement will likely experience perinatal healthcare inequities. Our findings suggest that current perinatal healthcare provision for this population is inadequate and national guidelines need updated to inform support.
Childhood obesity is an escalating crisis in the United States. Health policy may impact this epidemic which disproportionally affects underserved populations.
The aim was to use the reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance (RE-AIM) framework to assess health policy impact on preventing or treating school-aged children (5 > 18 years) with obesity in underserved populations.
A scoping review of 842 articles was conducted. Twenty-four articles met the inclusion criteria and underwent data extraction.
Twelve studies included subgroup analysis, with four suggesting an impact of policy on at-risk groups. None of the 24 studies fully applied the RE-AIM framework. Policies positively impacted childhood obesity in 12 studies across the sample.
Our review revealed inconsistent evidence for the effectiveness of policy on childhood obesity, perhaps due to the lack of focus on the social determinants of health. In addition, many studies did not evaluate the outcomes for underserved populations. Therefore, we propose more attention to social determinants in future legislation and evaluation of policy effectiveness on underserved populations. Findings identify an urgent need for the design, implementation, and evaluation of policies specifically directed to address the inequities of racism, social injustices, and social determinants of health that impact childhood obesity in the United States. Future work needs to identify who was reached by the policy, who benefitted from the policy, and how policies were implemented to address obesity-related health disparities. Nurses should advocate for the evaluation of childhood obesity policies, particularly in underserved populations, to determine effectiveness. Nurses, particularly those trained in population and community health and research, should advocate for policy research that considers inequities rather than controls for these variables. Multi-layered interventions can then be tailored to sub-populations and evaluated more effectively.