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QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH CRITUQUE AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATION
Name
Institution
Background Study
One of the most common illnesses affecting the quality of human life and an affiliate to various chronic diseases is depression. Healthcare facilities and the professional care providers are witnessing a surge in the number of people suffering from the disease with most of them indicating severe symptoms. The recommended or standard diagnostic measures for depression patients is the administration and or prescription of antidepressant medications (ADM). Treatment failure for depression patients leads to poor or low quality of life and is often associated with low medical compliance on the part of the patient. Nurses play a significant role in ensuring that the patients comply with the antidepressant medications through various methods and techniques known to improve patients’ adherence to antidepressant medication. However, most the interventions made by the nurses are unbeknown to people outside the healthcare industry and specifically the care giver’s profession. Similarly, information on the impact of the nurses’ intervention methods on the patients or rather the results of the approach that they use is not readily available for people to access and read. It is thus necessary to highlight some of the methods used by the nurses to enhance medication adherence in patients with depression to gauge their effect upon application and establish the efficacy of nursing education in increasing the antidepressant compliance.
The purpose of the study is to establish the efficacy of nursing education in medication in improving or enhancing compliance with antidepressant medications.
Research questions:
-what are some of the interventional programs for enhancing antidepressant medication compliance?
-what are the efficacy levels for the other intervention approaches utilized by health care providers dealing with patients in depression?
-how effective or how does nursing education about the necessity to continue taking medication compare to the other interventions in improving antidepressant compliance?
The questions outlined are in tandem with the purpose of the study as they provide a reference point upon and against which the effectiveness or efficacy of nursing education as an intervention in facilitating medication compliance.
Methods of Study
A review of several articles, peer-reviewed journals, dated between spanning between the years 2002 in January and October 2011 made for the quantitative research (Barbara A. Heise, 2014). The articles were identified through the use of keywords that formed a correlation with the subject topic and included: compliance, concordance, medication adherence, persistence, depression, dropout or treatment refusal, termination, discontinuation, antidepressants and intervention. The peer-reviewed articles were only allowed to be part of the research if they were written in English and within the stipulated time frame. An inclusion criterion was used in selecting the journal articles with the relevant study materials or context for studying compliance improvement in antidepressant medication (Barbara A. Heise, 2014).
The articles meeting the criteria shared factors such as a varying methodology in their individual studies. The studies would have embraced different methodologies such as controlled clinical trials or randomized controlled trials (RCT). Secondly, selected study articles must have used consenting adults aged 18 years and above with depressive disorders. However, the selection excluded patients with bipolar, psychotic, and personality disorders. Standardized techniques of measuring or rather monitoring the compliance of patients with medication and subsequent outcomes for adherence or non-compliance also a determining factor for the study’s selection (Gwen van Servellen, 2011). The studies selected for the research should be involving patients who are starting their prescriptions or who are already on prescribed antidepressants.
The dependent variable was the rate of compliance against intervention which acted collectively as an independent variable
The authors benefitted from the previous participation of the patients in the selected studies for their research as they did not have to seek their consent once again. Instead, the authors had to make deductions based on their study and analysis of the ...