Creating a Nursing Thesis

Many medics with experience in the health sector decide to devote themselves to scientific work or combine it with practice. Papers on nursing are very important in modern science. They can become good manuals for students and nurses who are just starting to work in the medical field. Here are some useful tips that will help you create a nursing thesis correctly.

How to Write a Nursing Thesis: Composition

As usual, there are such traditional sections of the nursing thesis as “Introduction,” “Literature review,” “Materials and methods of research,” “Results of the research,” “Discussion of results,” “Conclusions,” and “Practical recommendations.” This is the most established and generally accepted form of the material’s presentation. Any deviation on the part of the author from this form should be strictly justified from the point of view of its expediency. Proceeding from the same tradition, the optimal number of chapters in the nursing thesis should be 4-5 sections, regardless of the total workload. Too many chapters suggest that the author cannot group the material logically, or it does not fully correspond to the topic indicated in the title. Very often in the course of the study, a lot of new interesting data are revealed, which, however, are not directly related to the main topic.

Language and Style of a Nursing Thesis

Check the terminology that you use in your nursing thesis. These terms should be universally recognized, or, if you enter a new one, it should be clear. If it is introduced by you instead of another one, you must provide the proof of its advantages. Make sure that such a replacement is urgently needed. Usually, this or that definition or term is not universal and has its drawbacks. Anatomical and histological terminology should correspond to the international nomenclature. It is recommended to adhere to the international nomenclature of diseases. Sometimes, one has to deal with stylistically lowered expressions and vulgarisms in the text, which are encountered in the speech of doctors but are unacceptable in the scientific literature. Remove unnecessary words. The replacement of the phrase “The data obtained as a result of the study, indicate …” by the phrase, “The results of the study testify …” will be logical. You should avoid cumbersome multistage complex sentences that sometimes take up a whole paragraph in your nursing thesis. They can always be divided into a few simpler and more understandable phrases, which only make the text of your work better.

Work on the Chapters of the Nursing Thesis

Literature Review

Any nursing thesis begins with a study of the materials on its issues after which you can write a review of the literature.The main purpose of the literature review is to show what is already known about the topic, what has been investigated before you, and what remains unexplored. When reading some of the literature reviews, it seems that the author is trying to convince the reader of his or her erudition. This unconscious desire may be due to various circumstances. If there are very few works on your topic in the literature, and you are afraid that the list of used sources will look too short, and therefore you may be suspected of not sufficiently deep researching of the problem. This is naive. First, the members of the evaluation panel are competent enough, and they have been working with the literature of your research for many years. They know that there is a very small number of works on this issue. Second, there are many known reviews in which no more than fifteen literary sources are cited, and this may not be a disadvantage, because the problem of your nursing thesis is not developed and you can create a unique and useful nursing thesis. A literature review is not just a listing of already known facts, but it may be a rethinking of these facts by you, and such a review can be a kind of independent theoretical study. Representations about the mechanisms of the development of a disease, obtained on the basis of an analysis of the work of different researchers, can be generalized by you in your original pathogenesis scheme. It is recommended to use works created over the last ten years, but this is not a rule. If the bulk of work on the issue of fat embolism refers to the period of the 1950s, and subsequent work is relatively small, no one will reproach you for using old literature, especially if the information in it is not obsolete, but in general is contained only in this work and are important for understanding the problem.

Materials and Methods of Research

The importance of this chapter is often underestimated by some applicants. It is difficult to guess whether your nursing thesis or the author’s abstract will be read from cover to cover, but you may not doubt that the audience will read this part of your nursing thesis very attentively. According to the way the material was selected, whether your experiments were correct from the point of view of the initial conditions, setting parameters, ways of modeling pathological processes, whether the methods of obtaining information were adequate and whether methods of statistical processing were used correctly, the reader gets the main impression about:

• whether the studied material is representative enough in qualitative and qualitative terms and whether it meets the purpose and objectives of the study;
• whether the division of the surveyed patients into groups is made correctly and whether they are sufficiently homogeneous;
• how deeply and in-detail the author’s problem was developed;
• is it true that the work has been built in the general scientific and methodological plan and whether basic scientific principles have been violated in it;
• whether the volume of applied techniques allows you to obtain a fairly holistic picture of the problem under study, or the author dares to make far-reaching conclusions on the basis of studying some particular issues in the future too boldly.

When presenting your views on the discussed problem, try to illustrate them graphically in the form of a pathogenesis scheme, an algorithm for diagnosis of the disease, a treatment regimen, etc. Such a schematic image facilitates understanding of your views on the issue under arouses a positive response among a significant number of readers. A graph or a table, presented in the form of a poster, will be very helpful in presenting your views.

How to Draw Conclusions Correctly

First, make sure that your conclusions correlate with the title of the nursing thesis correctly. After all, many people will read not a whole work but its abstract acquainting themselves with the title of the work and conclusions. This part of the nursing thesis should be sufficiently capacious in content; it must reflect the most significant results of your research.

Practical Recommendations

The main requirement for this section is that it should not be written in the form of some abstract desires. You must give clear recommendations in your nursing thesis, for example, such statement will be incorrect, “the hemodynamics should be monitored,” you should write, “study the relevant indicators and their subsequent comprehensive evaluation by such a technique.” Another requirement is that your recommendations should be feasible in everyday practice. An ironic smile or irritation can be caused by advice to use a rather capricious or costly immunohistochemical reaction in the pathology laboratory of a simple hospital, which often finds it difficult to solve the problem of acquiring slides or paraffin.

References

An obligatory condition for the preparation of this section of the thesis is compliance with the requirements concerning the bibliographic description of literary sources. Read the text and make sure that all the works you refer to in it are included in the list of references of the nursing thesis (it is better to do this with an assistant). Make sure that the names of the same journals and collections in all the works you have been reduced in the same way. Accept the options for shortening the names of the journals by checking the bibliographic index “Index Medicus.” If you doubt the correctness of the abbreviation, it is better to give its full name, this is allowed. Make sure that the works of the same author, published in different years, are listed in chronological order in your nursing thesis.