NUR 4880 - Critical Reasoning in Complex Health Care Systems: NUR 4880 Tips

These are examples of full text literature reviews on other topics that have been published in nursing journals. The parts of these articles are NOT necessarily the same as the sections Dr. Eustace requires in the rubric for your systems paper.  They also do NOT use the WHO Framework for Health Systems Strengthening, so your own review will have major differences. However, some of the sections may give you ideas about how to structure some of the parts of your review.

Using the exact phrase or keyword for the WHO Systems Framework building block may not be very effective.  You may have better luck using MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) in PubMed or CINAHL Subject Headings in CINAHL (when available) because they will allow you to focus on the building block as a an actual in the article. The subject headings do not usually match the name of the building block exactly, but they are likely to get more relevant results.

I have listed search terms for these building blocks below.  You can copy and paste them into your search on your health topic or issue.

Suggested PubMed search terms for building blocks:

• leadership or governance
• "Healthcare Financing"[Mesh]
• "Health Personnel"[Mesh]   (another way to say health workforce; will get more results)
• "Delivery of Health Care"[Mesh]  (a way to search for service delivery)
• "Health Information Systems"[Mesh]

Suggested CINAHL search terms for building blocks:

• (MH "Leadership") OR (MH "Shared Governance") OR (MH "Clinical Governance") OR "governance"
• health care financ* or healthcare financ* 
• MH "Health Personnel+"
• (MH "Health Care Delivery+")
• (MH "Health Information Systems+")

NURSING ROLE

Use CINAHL to search for articles from nursing journals.

To look for articles about the nurse's role, do NOT type "nursing role" or "nurse's role".  If you do, you may get very few useful results because that search would only find articles where the author used one of those exact phrases.  Instead, you want to try to limit the results on your topic to articles that have been written by, about, or for nurses. 

Search your HP 2030 topic of interest. Then, in the second search blank, type nurs* in your keyword search. 

If searching for nurs* as a keyword isn't useful, another option is to add "SB nursing" to your search.  This will search for articles only in journals that CINAHL classifies as nursing journals so they are more likely to emphasize the nurse's role.

Note: There are several other ways to get nursing-related articles in CINAHL if you don't get enough useful results.  Please contact Ximena if you have trouble finding what you need.

The easiest way to make sure you are NOT overusing the limits is to run your search FIRST and then use the menu to the LEFT of your search results list to apply the limiters you need.  For this assignment, you will definitely want to use the following limiters:

• Peer-reviewed
• Research article - This will get research studies, including original research studies and systematic reviews or meta-analyses.
• Publication date (year slider)
• Language - English

Note: The limiters mentioned above should display on the left side of the page.  If not, click "Show more" under the year slider to see the full list of limiters.

The videos below were developed by Carrie Price at Towson University and EBSCO, respectively, to demonstrate how to browse for subject headings and use them to search PubMed and CINAHL by subjects rather than keywords.  These videos do not use the health system building blocks you are required to use for your assignment, but you can use the same process to browse for the subject headings that correspond to your building block(s).  If you need help with your search, please email ximena.chrisagis@wright.edu .

This video from Health Professions Librarian Carrie Price at Towson University shows how to use Medical Subject Headings in PubMed.  I have set the video to start on the PubMed screen rather than at Towson University's access point.