EDITORIAL
Tendencies in nursing care research
IAdjunct Professor of the Nursing School of Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
IIAssociate Professor of the Nursing School of Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
Nursing care research has a long history that follows its professionalization since Florence Nightingale(1). Her "Notes on nursing" is a landmark in the literature and its multiple developments. Since then, nurses
engaged in assuring quality of patient, family and community care have intensified the production of reflections, experience reports and research on their care practices.
Revista Gaúcha de Enfermagem has the privilege of presenting an outline of Brazilian nursing care research community's scientific output since 1976, produced in different contexts. The development of Graduate Programs in Nursing as well as research funding though still quantitatively insufficient to attend to the nursing field's demands have notoriously influenced to expand this scientific output.
In such a context, we ask: what are the perspectives and tendencies in nursing care research as published by Revista Gaúcha de Enfermagem? First, we sought to understand what such multiplicities on nursing care would be. We agreed that their features would be (1) the caring of individuals and groups from birth to death; (2) education and research in the caring process, in permanent education, in the training of new nursing professionals and in knowledge production; as well as (3) the administrative-managerial dimension(2).
With the purpose of surveying works on nursing care published in Revista Gaúcha de Enfermagem in the last five years (from 2005 to 2009), we searched for articles that contained the descriptors "nursing" and "nursing care".
We identified nineteen articles, whose authors come from many Learning Institutions in Brazil. The predominant themes were "nursing management" (eight articles), "care humanization" (three articles) and "care of hospitalized children" (three articles). As to what concerns to the types of the texts, we found sixteen original qualitative research; two reflections; and one experience report.
The data showed above presents a limitation, though, posed by the facts that the search considered descriptors indicated by the authors, and only the article's abstracts were analyzed. We can infer that some articles on nursing care may have been excluded for as the theme could not be identified in the descriptors.
Finally, we can say that the scientific output on nursing care published in Revista Gaúcha de Enfermagem relates to continuous and present themes that follow the social, political and economical moment of nursing as a discipline. This is expressed in this volume, in which we can find articles with different themes following the different contexts where nursing care have been studied.
In this context, our challenge is to think nursing care critically, from perspectives that signal renewed practices capable of giving something in return to society.
REFERENCES
- 1 Nightingale F. Notas sobre a enfermagem: o que é e o que năo é. Săo Paulo, ABEN, 1989.
- 2 Pires D. A enfermagem enquanto disciplina, profissăo e trabalho. Rev. bras. enferm. [online]. 2009, vol.62, n.5 [citado 2010-06-14], pp. 739-744 . Disponível em: <http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-71672009000500015&lng=pt&nrm=iso>. ISSN 0034-7167. doi: 10.1590/S0034-71672009000500015.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
19 Oct 2010 -
Date of issue
Mar 2010
