Instruments For Clinical Health Care Research

Instruments for Clinical Health-Care Research, Third Edition will facilitate researching clinical concepts and variables of interest, and will enhance the focus on linking clinical variable assessment with routine measurement of everyday clinical interventions.

In a workshop organized by the Clinical Research roundtable, representatives from purchaser organizations (employers), payer organizations (health plans and insurance companies), and other stakeholder organizations (voluntary health associations, clinical researchers, research organizations, and the technology community) came together to explore: What do purchasers and payers need from the Clinical Research Enterprise? How have current efforts in clinical research met their needs? What are purchasers, payers, and other stakeholders willing to contribute to the enterprise? This book documents these discussions and summarizes what employers and insurers need from and are willing to contribute to clinical research from both a business and a national health care perspective.

Healthcare decision makers in search of reliable information that compares health interventions increasingly turn to systematic reviews for the best summary of the evidence. Systematic reviews identify, select, assess, and synthesize the findings of similar but separate studies, and can help clarify what is known and not known about the potential benefits and harms of drugs, devices, and other healthcare services. Systematic reviews can be helpful for clinicians who want to integrate research findings into their daily practices, for patients to make well-informed choices about their own care, for professional medical societies and other organizations that develop clinical practice guidelines. Too often systematic reviews are of uncertain or poor quality. There are no universally accepted standards for developing systematic reviews leading to variability in how conflicts of interest and biases are handled, how evidence is appraised, and the overall scientific rigor of the process. In Finding What Works in Health Care the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends 21 standards for developing high-quality systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research. The standards address the entire systematic review process from the initial steps of formulating the topic and building the review team to producing a detailed final report that synthesizes what the evidence shows and where knowledge gaps remain. Finding What Works in Health Care also proposes a framework for improving the quality of the science underpinning systematic reviews. This book will serve as a vital resource for both sponsors and producers of systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research.

"As in the first edition, the author has done a magnificent job compiling these instruments and providing important information that the reader can use to evaluate their usefulness." --Ora Lea Strickland, RN, PhD, FAAN (From the Foreword) This book provides all the essential research tools for assessing and measuring caring for those in the caring professions. Watson's text is the only comprehensive and accessible collection of instruments for care measurement in clinical and educational nursing research. The measurements address quality of care, patient, client, and nurse perceptions of caring, and caring behaviors, abilities, and efficacy. Newly updated, this edition also contains three new chapters, which document the most effective caring language and provide innovative methods of selecting appropriate tools for measurement based on validity and reliability. Key features of new edition: A chapter providing a comprehensive literature review of the research and measurement of caring A chapter entitled "Caring Factor Survey," which presents a new scale based on Watson's original theory of human caring Chapters outlining instruments for care measurement, including Holistic Caring Inventory, Peer Group Caring Interaction Scale, and many more New instruments focused on assessing caring at the administrative-relational caring level An updated section dedicated to challenges and future directions of the measurement of caring