Notes:
NURS 2024: Health of Older Adults
This assignment helps you with your assessment requirements.
For full assessment details, please refer to your course outline.
Nursing standards, safety and quality standards
The following resources may also be useful:
- Aged Care Quality Standards
Australian Government Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission Quality Standards - The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care
- Nursing and Midwifery Board: Professional standards for
- codes of conduct
- standards for practice, and
- codes of ethics
- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses
Nurses care planning process
Plan your search (video option)
- Searching for your whole assignment is not very effective
- Mapping out your search is a good place to start
- Identify the key concepts in your question or topic
- You don't need to search for task words
- Use double quotation marks (" ") to search for two or more words together as a phrase
- Think about what other words (synonyms and alternative terms) might be used to describe the key concepts
- You can use acronyms, but you should search for the full terms as well
- To find fewer results, add different concepts using AND (e.g. rural AND Australia)
- To find more results, add synonyms or alternative terms, to your search using OR (e.g. "renewable energy" OR solar OR wind)
- You can change your search as you find more information
- For more information, read the How to plan your search document
- How to plan your search (PDF)A short guide on steps you need to plan your search, including how to combine your search terms using OR, AND, NOT.
Search Strategies
After watching the above video you can now start by identifying the concepts (main ideas) from your assignment topic prior to searching. Consider alternative words for these concepts which, together with the concept term, become your searchable keywords. You can start by searching for the condition and the best practices for a plan of care.
Question:
Prepare a best-practice care plan for older adult patients with severe burns
| Keywords Concepts | Synonyms and alternative concepts |
| burns | fire injury, heat injury, thermal burn |
| plan of care | care plan |
| best practices | bench mark, best-practices, good practices |
Combined Search String:
| Line 1 | burn* OR "fire injur* " OR "heat injur* " OR "thermal burn*" |
| Connector | AND |
| Line 2 |
"care plan" OR "plan of care" |
| Connector | AND |
| Line 3 | "best practice*" OR "best-practice*" OR "good-practice*" OR "bench mark" |
Connectors: AND/ OR
Truncation: *
Phrase: ("word + word")
- Plan your search - Nursing guideLearn more about how to plan your search for your assignment in this Library guide.
Start with the Library Collection
The Library Collection is a useful starting point in searching for resources. In addition, you can search in some of the suggested databases below.
Databases
Emcare
Searching in Emcare is different to searching in the Library Collection.
1. Type your first concept and alternative words into the search box
2. Uncheck the box labelled Map to Subject Heading
3. Select Search
4. Repeat steps 1-3 for your next concepts
5. Tick the boxes next to each of your concept lines
6. Select Combine with AND
7. Scroll down to see your results
More useful databases:
- MEDLINE (via Ovid)The US National Library of Medicine database. Covers medicine, nursing, bio-medicine, pharmacy and allied health. Can filter by publication type.
- Health CollectionThe Health Collection includes research articles, reports and case studies of practical support to anyone studying or working in therapeutic, diagnostic and preventative health roles
- ScienceDirectFor peer reviewed articles on a large range of subjects including health
Writing a case study report for nursing
The following resources may also be useful:
- Case studies - RMITRMIT has created a short tutorial with three different mock case studies
Peer-reviewed journals (video option)
Articles from peer-reviewed journals are of high quality and can be used to support the argument that you are presenting. Articles in peer-reviewed journals must go through an evaluation process with experts in the field before being published. The term refereed is also used.
Watch the following video to learn more about scholarly sources.
- Often you will be asked to use scholarly, academic, or peer-reviewed sources in your assignment.
- Scholarly sources (also called academic sources) can include journal articles, books, conference papers, and theses.
- Sources such as Wikipedia, newspapers, magazines, trade journals, newsletters, blogs, social media and personal websites are called popular sources.
- A scholarly source:
- is written by researchers within a subject area,
- reports on research findings,
- contains comprehensive in-text citations and a reference list or bibliography,
- uses specialised terminology and a formal writing style, and
- is often peer-reviewed or refereed.
- A peer-reviewed or refereed journal article is assessed by experts within the field before it is published.
- Peer-reviewed journal articles should include:
- author details including affiliations with organisations,
- an abstract which summarises the article,
- evidence of research findings, and
- in-text citations and a reference list.
- When searching in the Library Catalogue or databases, you can filter for scholarly, academic, or peer-reviewed resources.
- Books can also be scholarly. A scholarly book:
- is written by an expert,
- is published by a reputable publisher,
- has a table of contents,
- provides in depth subject information,
- includes an index of terms, and
- has in-text citations and a reference list.
Correctly reference your sources (standard)
You must appropriately cite (‘acknowledge’) all references used in your assignment to avoid plagiarism.