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Purpose of the study
The article entitled Decision fatigue among clinical nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic deals with the impact the pandemic has had on the ability of nurses to make sound decisions as to the wellbeing of patients in clinical settings. The purpose of the study is to report the psychometric properties, including validity and reliability, of the decision fatigue scale (DFS) in regards to the pandemic and determine how the received meanings correspond to nurses psychological characteristics in usual settings (Pignatiello et al., 2022, p. 869).
Type of Research & the Design
The article is a secondary analysis of a broad cross-sectional study that aims to uncover the impact of pandemic on the nurses psychometric properties. The study includes a national convenience sample of nursing population who work over 20 hours per week.
Sample
Adult nurses who took part in the study were asked to complete the sociodemographic questionnaire indicating their age, race, gender and years of experience. It turned out that the majority of the participants were baccalaureate-prepared nurses (80.2%), [who] worked at least 36 hr per week, identified primarily as a staff nurse (75.9%), and more than half (54.2%) worked in a critical care practice setting (Pignatiello et al., 2022, p. 872).
Data Collection
160 respondents were chosen randomly online from those who agreed to take part in the study across the US. The prospective respondents were approached through advertisements on the American Association of Critical Care Nurses website, Facebook and social media cites. Apart from the sociodemographic questionnaire, respondents were asked to complete the decision fatigue scale (DFS) and the practice environment scale of the nursing work index. DFS is a self-report questionnaire where nurses are asked to indicate to what level they agree or disagree with the statement. The higher scores reflect the higher degree of decision fatigue and the lesser scores, vise versa, testify to the lesser amount of tiredness from the decision-making process.
The practice environment scale of the nursing work index was developed to reflect nurses satisfaction with their working environment. Not unlike DFS, the scale suggests nurses to range their agreement or disagreement with the given statements in number from 1 to four, where one stands for strong disagreement and four implies complete agreement with the statements. The higher scores a nurse gets, the friendlier she deems the environment she works in. Another instrument used in the study is The Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) designed to measure the level of stress a nurse experiences in case of a traumatic event. The scale offers nurses to range their experience in numbers from 0 to four, where 0 stands for the least traumatic experience and 4 for the most traumatic one.
Data Analysis
The data received from DFS, the practice environment scale of the nursing work index, and IES-R was analysed using computer programme IBM SPSS ver. 27. Moreover, DFSs structural validity was assessed using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and the KaiserMeyer Olkin coefficient. The scale proved to have high validity of the results. Cronbachs ± coefficient was computed to assess the DFSs internal consistency reliability, which was also found high enough to get credible results.
Limitations
The findings are limited to the number of nurses wo took part in the study. Since only nurses who work over 20 hours a week were invited to take part in the research, the study is not representative of other nursing staff who have less workload and experience. Moreover, the results may be exaggerated since the levels of stress measured in the COVID pandemic, an event contusive to stress in itself.
Findings/Discussion
A strong correlation between DFS and IES-R scores was found which testifies to the direct impact of stress and fatigue on nurses ability to make decisions. Apart from stress factors, it was found that unhealthy working environments are conducive to higher levels of stress, which impede decision-making. Thus, the combination of fatigue, stress and overload, on the one hand, and unfriendly environment, on the other, reduce nurses inability to make sound decisions in clinical settings.
Reading Research Literature
Writing any qualifying work requires the skills to work with scientific literature. Scientific articles contain the latest information, that is why reading scientific articles helps understand what information is relevant and what questions remain unanswered (Jones & Hale, 2019). After reading a scientific article, one may see what else needs to be done in this or that area and use it for his or her research project. From completing the reading research literature activity worksheet, I learned about the types of research work that exist, the methods used for research, as well as the reliability and validity criteria for these methods.
Moreover, I learned to create sample groups, a skill necessary if I will have to conduct a survey-based research project. I learned to consider limitations of studies and assess whether these limitations significantly lower the credibility of the presented results. Finally, I learned to see what questions may be further tackled based on the results of this or that study and may provide ground for further research.
References
Jones, B., & Hale, J. (2019). Analytical Reading: Primary Scientific Literature. KAHPERD Journal, 56(2).
Pignatiello, G. A., Tsivitse, E., OBrien, J., Kraus, N., & Hickman Jr, R. L. (2022). Decision fatigue among clinical nurses during the COVID19 pandemic. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 31(7-8), 869-877. Web.
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