Western Governors University - BS Nursing

Western Governors University's (WGU) BS Nursing program is a highly credible and well-recognized academic degree in the U.S. and outside it.

There are quite a few strengths of the program making it a highly credible pick by the certified nurses who want to move on to the next level: B.S. Nursing.

The standard completion time for this online course is 18 months in which the candidate has to cover quite a few time-bound tasks, projects, and activities that add up to their passing score. You can find all the details of this program here.

The purpose of this post is NOT to promote the WGU's BS Nursing program. No way! I write this post only to let you know that, EXCEPT FOR HARD/NATURAL SCIENCES TASKS, I can provide assistance in all the tasks for this program since this is my job to help out students in their time of difficulty while pursuing an academic goal in the middle of their professional and home-based responsibilities.

So, I would give you a brief overview about some of the major tasks required to complete in this program.

The degree is divided in quite a few sections/subdomains of health care and nursing, and each section covers subjects from basic calculus to literature, from evidence-based practice to community health nursing, etc. Major breakdown of the program falls into the following subdomains.

1. Professional development
2. Quality and safety
3. Evidence-based practice
4. Applied leadership
5. Community and population health

Under each of these subject areas, there are quite a few tasks and activities that involve fieldwork, research, collaboration, synthesis, and writing. The overall focus of the degree program, thus, is to develop in the nurse the professional skills and competencies that can help them play an active role at different levels in the health care sector.

If we look at the academic subdomain, Evidence-based practice, there are quite a few writing tasks that help the professional to nurture hardcore skills to play with evidence-based nursing. Evidence-based nursing has now become part of professional nursing, and so, the nurse has to consult available evidence with regards to a health care concern/issue needed for careful decision making.

WGU's EBP is particularly known for developing advanced-level skills for EBP in their students. The reason is that the subdomain enables the nurse to differentiate between different types of literature available in the current health care knowledgebase: 

• Primary research
• Secondary research
• Evidence guidelines
• Evidence summary
• Meta-analysis
• Synthesis of different types of evidence

and so on. Moreover, EBP also requires the nurse to carry out tasks that are field-based, i.e., the professional has to connect the literature search, review, and synthesis to the health care context they are either employed at or has knowledge of.

The end-result of covering the EBP is that the candidate gets away with a bundle of cutting-edge skills in EBP.

Community and Population Health Nursing is the most challenging yet exciting subdomain of BSN at WGU. Challenging because the professional has to carry out very rigorous activities by being part of a community (usually the ones they live in), and by applying the principles of community health nursing in that community to bring about a positive change.


C228 - Community Health Nursing – Task 1

For example, one of the tasks in this domain is Application of Community Health & Population-Focused Nursing, a lengthy write-up around 20 pages. Activities in the task involve applying quite a few tools to identify a community and understand the major health concerns the community faces. This is a field project. There are six mandatory tools needed of the researching nurse (You) to apply to his/her selected context and discuss the application in the main document. These are:

1. Population Economic Status Survey
2. Neighborhood/Community Safety Inventory
3. Cultural Assessment Tool
4. Disaster Assessment and Planning Guide
5. Windshield Survey
6. Population Health Scavenger Hunt. 

There are quite a lot of documents, guides, and links that accompany this task. The details required to carry out each of these six tools are clearly given in these accompanying resources. However, putting them all together in this task requires advance writing and synthesis skills. To make things easy for you, I discuss each of these six tools below giving you the insider's view, i.e., the approach by which you can have your task passed.

1. Population Economic Status Survey
PESS tool is actually a comprehensive approach taken by the nurse while working in the community to objectively understand the major health concerns faced by the community. The rationale for this tool, provided by the WGU, is that it helps the nurse to understand a health concern and argue her position in order to address the issue in favor of her community.

To cut short, the nurse has to dig deeper into major databases at the state and federal levels, i.e., American Fact Finer, City-Data.Com, Census.Gov, Healthy People 2020, etc. Alongside, she has to visit the local community centers such as the City Council, Health Department, non-profit organizations, and so on.

At the end of this exercise of information gathering, the nurse is able to understand the economic drivers at play in regards to the community's overall health status (the poor vs. the rich).

2. Neighborhood/Community Safety Inventory
NCSI is another tool to be applied in the community. It helps the nurse to understand the systemic level factors when it comes to her community's health status. This tool is to be filled up by observing and collecting data from community resources such as fire, police, emergency departments, disaster management to clearly understand the safety-related dynamics and to develop her inventory. Thus, you will have to visit the relevant departments to carry out this task which should involve formal/informal interviews and focus groups with the relevant staff; in addition, searching relevant databases over the Internet is part of the game here.

3. Cultural Assessment Tool
CAT clearly points us to the direction of understanding the racial/ethnic, gender, age-wise makeup of the community to help the nurse to better understand the dynamics of the present health concerns as spread over these domains. Understanding the role of culture is fundamental in community health nursing because it is well established in literature that different ethnic/cultural groups view epidemiology and treatment of a disease differently. For instance, a Hmong community member might possibly explain her epilepsy as a spirit taking her over.

This tool also requires you to search for data. However, it has a subjective element that requires you to meet different people and talk to them, interview them, and understand their viewpoint in relation to a health concern and its treatment. These two areas of investigation combine together to add another dimension to your community health nursing fieldwork.

4. Disaster Assessment and Planning Guide
DA&PG, as the title suggests, is about understanding the many resources your community utilizes to combat a disaster, natural or otherwise. This takes you to survey the community's geography to find out its industry, terrain, etc. and to plan for a possible route to prevent a disaster from hitting the community. DA&PG also asks you to take note of such factors as weather patterns, cultural outlook, contagious diseases, the spread of a disease, etc. It also puts you to trace the local government's position on these variables. As soon as you start to cover the areas given in the tool, the picture of disaster assessment and any loopholes start to emerge for you to argue in favor of your community's health.

5. Windshield Survey
WS tool should have come in the beginning of this list because it is used (and expected by WGU to be used) in the beginning of your community health fieldwork. As the name suggests, this tool is to get the feel of the community through the bird's eye view. WGU's guide to WS states, "While driving through your community, stop for coffee or have lunch in a neighborhood".

Hence, your focus is to bear a holistic understanding of your community's overall feel and look that includes its housing, commercial buildings, open spaces, etc.

6. Population Health Scavenger Hunt. 
PHSH tool follows the footprints of the famous scavenger hunt game. However, in this task, it requires the nurse to choose six facilities from the long list given in the supplementary resource. So, logically, what you're doing here is a scavenger hunt for the community's health by going to these facilities and collecting information. But the approach is rigorous and systematic.

For example, you chose American Red Cross. Now, the hunt requires you to answer the 13 questions given in the same guide from "What is the organization's target population?" down to "What specific services does the organization provide?". At the end, thus, your knowledge of the community is immaculate and you become an expert nurse on that community! Wow, hats off to the WGU's curriculum planners, honestly!

This should be very clear from the tools mentioned that the task is highly beneficial for nurturing community health nursing skills and competencies.

The task discussed above is followed by Community Health & Population-Focused Nursing Practicum. This task is also quite long, around 25 pages, and requires applying the knowledge of the community's health profile (as obtained in the previous task) to address ONE specific health concern (e.g. obesity, cancer, influenza, etc.). For this, the candidate, once again, jumps on to the field and works with a number of community-based stakeholders to come up with a viable health care plan to address that health concern by taking into account the epidemiology and the prevention factors of the health concern.

The fieldwork requires a lot of activities from collecting reliable statistics to critiquing available resources and any loopholes. With these areas covered, the nurse then DEVELOPS effective and EFFICACIOUS interventions. The required number is two.

These interventions are well-planned. You will have to demonstrate every aspect of these interventions, i.e. how you would carry out these interventions, their estimated impact factor, and the objective evaluations of the outcome.

So this practicum is really killing in terms of the skills, deeper level understanding of community health nursing, and the relevant competencies you gain while doing it.

With this brief overview of the WGU's BSN, I would suggest that you should go ahead and get your hands dirty with the explosive knowledge and skills that the program has to offer. However, if you need any assistance anywhere in the program, coming to me will not be a bad idea.

Good luck! My email: meokhan2/at/gmail/dot/com

Trustworthiness or 'Validity' in Qualitative Research?

This post covers the concept of trustworthiness in qualitative research (known as validity in quantitative research). The post specifically discusses the building blocks of trustworthiness: Credibility, Transferability, Dependability, and Confirmability. The purpose of this post it to share with the readers the recent developments in the area of qualitative research.

By understanding these areas discussed in the post, it is expected of the reader to become conversant with the idea of trustworthiness and to apply this concept to their qualitative research projects such as a dissertation, term paper, presentation, and the like.

In the past, qualitative research was closely associated with the concepts, constructs, and worldviews of quantitative research. Hence, quite a few such concepts were borrowed for qualitative research and applied with similar semantic properties to qualitative research. Validity is one such concept.

However, growing knowledgebase in qualitative research has postulated that the two research paradigms (qualitative vs. quantitative) hold different worldviews and need to be applied differently to specific research areas. For a succinct discussion on the evolution of qualitative research, read this interesting post.

Unlike recent past, present-day qualitative research scholars and thinkers have come up with more a refined approach in explaining the grounds on which qualitative studies should be critiqued for their rigor, reliability, and validity.

Trustworthiness (if I can trust what the study/research has found and can learn from its findings) may be seen as a holistic concept that ensures that qualitative research is accountable to the critical scrutiny of scholars, thinkers, and equally importantly, policymakers so that it can facilitate decision making.

Credibility, Transferability, Dependability, and Confirmability can thus be said to be the pillars of a rigorous qualitative study. Understanding these concepts and attempting to attain these in a study is inevitable for anyone who wishes to produce authentic work in the area of qualitative research.

I explain these concepts precisely.

Credibility
This concepts is essentially home to a qualitative study. Since qualitative research has words as the central communicative devise of its message, credibility implies that the research scholar takes as much care as possible to convey to the reader the original subject-matter reported by the research participants, context, and/or the social issue to the researcher.

Honestly, most of the time, it is NOT possible for a researcher to report a participant's account verbatim, due mainly to word limit constraints. Thus, scholars like Maxwell, Patton, Creswell (you might want to read my previous post that reviews their books on the latest developments in qualitative research), among others, have offered a set of useful strategies that can come to the researcher's rescue.

These strategies are thick description (detailing an account in as much depth as necessary to address your research aims and objectives), prolonged engagement with participants (to gain an in-depth understanding of their issues, and the social context they are in), coanalysis (to collaborate with participants/peers to create mutually-constructed meaning of a research context).

Transferability
In his book, Creswell has enumerated that unlike quantitative research, qualitative studies do not conform well to the idea of replication simply because one social context is fairly different from another even within the same geographical area and/or country; hence the concept of transferability finds its way here. This concept implies that a qualitative researcher can first identify with a previously done study and can try to transfer its central premise to his/her own context.

The key is to discuss all the pertinent details about the social context being explored under these premises.

Dependability
The concept of dependability implies the extent to which a reader can depend/trust the findings of a qualitative research. This is very critical for a powerful study because it is the words in which you convince the reader of the rigor your study has. To attain dependability, thus, the researcher has to ensure employing some widely established and accepted strategies.

Some of the useful strategies to create greater dependability in your research is to have consistent reporting from the start to the end of your research. This requires you to note and communicate all the ups and downs confronted during the study. This would not only bring more transparency to your research but would also put the reader in the shoes of the judge.

More often, students think that eliminating any loopholes from their research report would make it a perfect piece. However, this is a wrong assumption because qualitative research is a way of interacting with people in a meaningful way; and, such an interaction is never perfect. Thus, talking about the issues, obstacles, conflicts, biases, etc. in a research would bring more dependability in it.

Confirmability
This concept in qualitative research is a holistic organization or coherence of the entire research study. Generally, a study offers an overall rationale for the study, specific research aims and objectives, undertakes data collection and analysis, and concludes by sharing the findings and recommendations.

Confirmability holds that from the very beginning of the study, all its subsequent activities should be well justified against the overall purpose of the study and its goals. Thus, there must be a rationale behind every activity that you undertake. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

It is these four major conceptual directions that assist a researcher to ensure that their qualitative study is not only rigorous but is also trustworthy for the readership to learn from its findings to help move the world forward. There are other strategies that come under these umbrella concepts. Once you have a clear understanding of these four pillars that form the overall trustworthiness of a qualitative study, it is likely that you'd find it easier to incorporate other strategies in your overall research effort.

I hope you find my post informative. Do not forget to share your thoughts with me.

Critical Analysis of Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor: The Four Challenges

In this post I am going to share with the reader a critical analysis of Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor. A Country Doctor is a narrative account that presents professional, moral, and psychological aspects of human self. First I discuss the major themes of the story; it is followed by my reaction on the four challenges faced by the doctor and the frustrations accompanying these challenges; then I analyze important aspects of the story which can help analyze it as a nightmare.

The Central Themes in A Country Doctor

The main themes of the text are traceable in the light of at least two contemporary influences on Franz Kafka.

1.      The first one, his symbolic illustration of Jewish folklore in his writings, in connection to life that was in then Europe (the time of Kafka’s life);

2.      The other influence is Kafka’s predisposition toward the growing popularity of the tradition of psychoanalysis (essentially Freudian) and its troublesome interpretation of human sexuality and sexual tensions in general life.

These two themes construct a complicated picture in the story that represents quite a few social and psychological predicaments shown to us around the short life account of the doctor, the central character of the story.

It is essentially these two influences (Jewish folklore and Freudian psychoanalysis) that produce several sub-themes in the narrative. For example, it would probably be very rational to follow Lorenz who states that the character of the doctor is Kafka’s masterful depiction of a mixture of “divergent models” that signify, sexual desire, manhood, civilization, and feebleness that one may feel while making just one straight decision or choice.

It is this situation that makes the doctor feel lost while he confronts his psychological predicaments.

One more important theme is the changeover that (seemingly) the Jew doctor feels between his conventional position and the strains of the human flesh. Therefore, when we see the doctor emerging as the hostile groom, this is in fact the vicious side of the doctor. His maid, Rosa, however, is a representation of the doctor’s sexual side – the back of his mind inflicted with sexual thoughts. The sick young man in the story may be a signification of the “Gentile stereotype of the Jew”. Similarly, when the Jew doctor just readily lies down besides the young patient, this intensifies the hidden tension between the conscious and unconscious thoughts present in the doctor’s mind.

Constantly, we are reminded of sexual tension in Freudian tradition and the way Kafka’s doctor tries to situate himself between the tension and the traditional stance of Judaism. These themes can even be enlarged if Kafka’s own life, his aversion to marriage, and his inability to form a heterosexual relation in his life are also taken into account. Therefore, the story offers quite a few subtle and obvious themes that emerge from the primary structure of the story which at surface is just about reaching a distant village to attend to a sick patient. It is the literary mastery of Kafka that makes the story open to as many themes and subthemes as the reader can find out. (186-198).

The Challenges

There are quite a few challenges confronted by Kafka’s central character in the story.

The First Challenge

Firstly, the doctor cannot find a horse on a stormy night and he has to attend to a sick man in another village. As his horse already died of overwork, he is frustrated both psychologically and professionally. The psychological frustration comes with the fact that with his horse dead, no one from the village is ready to lend him a horse and so the professional frustration emerges out of this one. Perhaps, this can increase his frustration because no one takes this doctor to be worthy of lending a horse even when he wants to attend to a sick person.

The Second Challenge

Second challenge takes place as the groom comes out of the pigsty followed by two horses “with thick steaming bodies” (¶ 1). As the groom offers him the horses and leashes up his lustfulness for Rosa, the doctor is faced with the challenge as weather to go to attend to the patient or to save his servant Rosa from the blue-eyed beast. This challenge has sexual, physical, and moral frustrations that remain with the doctor up to the end and we see him completely haunted by these thoughts even when he checks up the sickly young man.

 The Third Challenge

The doctor confronts the third challenge as he tries to examine the patient. This challenge is a blend of the previous thoughts, his professional loyalty, the vulnerable family of the patient, and the intrusion of the horses during his examination. Thus, he is frustrated by how to find out the cure of the wound in the boy’s body “in the region of the hip”, and how to satisfy the patient and his family. This challenge is heightened by his failure to cure the boy’s wound and because the patient’s family “demanded the impossible from” him – he is frustrated since he finds no way to go about any of the ways.

The Forth Challenge

The forth challenge comes out of his thoughts of Rosa, perhaps being raped by the groom; he has to save her by going back home. Here he is frustrated by the fact that now on his journey back home the horses are not moving fast enough (¶ 1). This entire scene from the showing up of the groom up to this phase is regarded by some critics as the stage that Kafka set to portray the subtleties or human psychology and how different forces within a human mind work in opposition to each other (Marson & Leopld).

Conclusion

The entire story can be fairly regarded as a nightmare because the story has events taking place in a manner which is far from reality, and most have negative connotations. For instance, the appearance of the groom and the horses from pigsty is as odd as the doctor’s instant movement to the other village leaving Rosa behind with the groom, and the way the patient’s wound is reflected: A wound representing the psyche of the doctor, a rusty wound; additionally, the story is beyond reality when we see how the patient’s family rips the doctor off his clothes and the sloth with which he moves back home, naked (Potter).

A Country Doctor is a complex representation of a number of themes within a short fiction story which not only invites the reader to its language but also to its background being immensely provocative.