Like ‘Being in Jail in a Way’: A Study Investigates How Anorexic Adolescents and Their Nurses View Inpatient Treatment

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Bar the View by HereStanding, via Flickr

For adolescents with severe anorexia, experts have long relied on treatment in specialized pediatric acute care settings, using programs that are based on behavior modification principles and that promote stability through refeeding.

But what is it like to be a young inpatient in such a program? And how does the behavior modification approach affect the nurse–patient relationship? To learn more, nurse researcher Lucie Michelle Ramjan and colleague Betty I. Gill conducted a study in an Australian acute care facility. Their findings are reported in this month’s CE: Original Research feature, “An Inpatient Program for Adolescents with Anorexia Experienced as a Metaphoric Prison.”

The research. Ramjan, the study’s principal investigator, conducted in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 10 adolescent patients being treated for anorexia and 10 pediatric nurses. The interviews were audiotaped; the tapes were then transcribed verbatim, read and reread, and subjected to thematic analysis. As another writer has noted elsewhere, in qualitative research, metaphors often “illuminate the meanings of experiences.” In this study, the researchers found that both nurses and patients “consistently used the metaphor of prison life to articulate their experiences.”

That striking metaphor offered Ramjan and Gill a framework for […]

2016-11-21T13:09:31-05:00August 6th, 2012|nursing research, patient engagement|3 Comments

AJN’s August Issue: A Metaphorical Prison, a Found Manuscript, a Nurse Carries the Torch, More

AJN’s August issue is now available on our Web site. Here’s a selection of what not to miss, including two continuing education (CE) articles, which you can access for free.

Nurses play a crucial role in inpatient programs for anorexia in adolescents, but how do the patients view them? Our Original Research article, “An Inpatient Program for Adolescents with Anorexia Experienced as a Metaphorical Prison,” describes the experience of adolescents in an Australian inpatient behavioral program and how both nurses’ and patients’ perception of the program as a metaphoric prison negatively affected the development of therapeutic relationships between them. This CE article is open access and can earn you 2.5 CE credits.

Health information technology (HIT) is a central aspect of current U.S. government efforts to reduce costs and improve the efficiency and safety of the health care system. But what does this really mean for nurses? Health Information Technology and Nursing,”  the first article in a series of three on HIT and nursing, will examine the federal policies behind efforts to expand the use of this technology. This CE article is open access and can earn you 2.1 CE credits.

Accord­ing to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 348,000 unlicensed as­sistive personnel were employed in the hospital set­ting in 2011. Our Cultivating Quality article, “Continuing Education for Patient Care Technicians: A Unit-Based, RN-Led Initiative,” explores how one teaching […]

2016-11-21T13:09:36-05:00July 27th, 2012|Nursing|2 Comments
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