Sherri Melrose

Paternal postpartum depression: How can nurses begin to help?

Abstract Men’s emotional health can be overlooked during their partner’s pregnancy and throughout the first postpartum year. Postpartum depression, once expected only in new mothers, is now estimated to occur in 4–25% of new fathers as well. The incidence of paternal postpartum depression is greater in couples where maternal postpartum depression is also present. Paternal postpartum depression can be difficult to assess. New fathers may seem more angry and anxious than sad. And yet, depression is present. When left untreated, paternal postpartum depression limits men’s capacity to provide emotional support to their partners and children. This article reviews the incidence and prevalence of paternal postpartum depression, comments on tools to measure the disorder, identifies paternal behaviors that may indicate depression, examines the effects of parental depression on families and discusses what nurses can do to begin to help.

Seasonal Affective Disorder: An Overview of Assessment and Treatment Approaches.

Seasonal affective disorder or SAD is a recurrent major depressive disorder with a seasonal pattern usually beginning in fall and continuing into winter months. A subsyndromal type of SAD, or S-SAD, is commonly known as “winter blues.” Less often, SAD causes depression in the spring or early summer. Symptoms center on sad mood and low energy. Those most at risk are female, are younger, live far from the equator, and have family histories of depression, bipolar disorder, or SAD. Screening instruments include the Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire (SPAQ). Typical treatment includes antidepressant medications, light therapy, Vitamin D, and counselling. This paper provides an overview of SAD.

What Works? A Personal Account of Clinical Teaching Strategies in Nursing

Few definitive lists of simple but effective strategies that could be applied to a variety of practicum settings are available to nurse educators. Although clinical education textbooks (Gaberson & Oermann, 1999; O’Connor, 2001; Diekelmann, 2003) and research oriented journals such as The Journal of Nursing Education and Nurse Educator provide academic direction, practical suggestions are also valuable. This brief communication provides a synthesis of instructional strategies that are easy to implement and that both students and teachers value.

Perfectionism and Depression: Vulnerabilities Nurses Need to Understand

Striving for excellence is an admirable goal. Adaptive or healthy perfectionism can drive ambition and lead to extraordinary accomplishments. High-achieving people often show signs of perfectionism. However, maladaptive, unhealthy, or neurotic perfectionism, where anything less than perfect is unacceptable, can leave individuals vulnerable to depression. In both personal and professional relationships, nurses need to understand how accepting only perfection in self and others is likely to lead to emotional distress. This paper reviews perfectionism as a personality style, comments on perfectionism and high achievement, discusses vulnerabilities to depression, identifies how to recognize perfectionists, and presents balancing strategies perfectionists can implement to lessen their vulnerability to depression.

Becoming Socialized into a New Professional Role: LPN to BN Student Nurses' Experiences with Legitimation.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative descriptive study that explored the professional socialization experiences of Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs) who attended an online university to earn a Baccalaureate degree in nursing (BN), a prerequisite to writing the Canadian Registered Nurse (RN) qualifying exam. The project was framed from a constructivist worldview and Haas and Shaffirs theory of legitimation. Participants were 27 nurses in a Post-LPN to BN program who came from across Canada to complete required practicums. Data was collected from digital recordings of four focus groups held in different cities. Transcripts were analyzed for themes and confirmed with participants through member checking. Two overarching themes were identified and are presented to explain how these unique adult learners sought to legitimize their emerging identity as Registered Nurses (RNs). First, Post-LPN to BN students need little, if any, further legitimation to affirm their identities as “nurse.” Second, practicum interactions with instructors and new clinical experiences are key socializing agents.

Mentoring online graduate students: partners in scholarship

Mentoring graduate students toward scholarly research and writing activities has become an important area of focus for faculty at the Centre for Nursing and Health Studies at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. With an emphasis on teaching excellence, instructors seek out and create experiences to involve graduate students in their own programme of research and publication. However, despite a plethora of literature available on the concept of mentoring, few definitive guidelines exist to illustrate what the process might look like within Masters programmes offered exclusively through a WebCT online environment. This paper describes an approach to mentoring two graduate students in the Master of Health Studies programme that was perceived as positive and mutually beneficial for the proteges as well as the mentor. Insights are revealed into the experiences that these students found both engaging and difficult as they developed skills in analysing qualitative research and submitting manuscripts for publication. The students’ stories are discussed to describe significant features of the experience of Education for Primary Care (2006) 17: 57–62 # 20065 Radcliffe Publishing Limited

Resisting, Reaching Out and Re-imagining to Independence: LPN’s Transitioning towards BNs and Beyond

Abstract Little is known about the process of how nurses transition between vocational training and institutions of higher education. Understanding this process provides educators with the knowledge to support new groups of university students making this transition. Grounded theory (GT) was used to explore and understand this process. Three studies from a 7-year research program were used as data. The analysis led to the generation of a GT illuminating the process of students transitioning from post-LPN to BN. This GT illustrates how students overcome difficulties encountered moving to a more complex nursing role. The students’ main concern was a lack of independence. The core variable, which resolves this main concern, and which emerged from the analysis of the data is developing independence. There are three sub-core variables, resisting, reaching out and re-imagining which support this core variable of developing independence.

Help-Seeking Experiences of Health Care Learners in a WebCT Online Graduate Study Program

This article presents findings from a qualitative research project that explored health care students’ activities related to seeking help within a masters program offered exclusively through a WebCT online environment. A constructivist theoretical perspective and an action research approach framed the study. Data sources included one question on a program satisfaction questionnaire, focus groups and ten individual audio tape-recorded transcribed interviews. Content was analyzed for themes and confirmed through ongoing member checking with participants. The following four overarching themes were identified and are used to explain and describe significant features of help-seeking experiences of online health care learners: (1) Self-help included reflection and re-reading directions available within the course; (2) A primary source of help was other students in the class; (3) Involving family, friends and co-workers provided important educational support; and (4) Instructors’ first message, involvement in weekly discussions and anecdotal comments were highly valued.

Teaching Health Professionals Online: Frameworks and Strategies

and complex topics such as human interaction. Additional examples of such topics are compassion, human connection, motivation, inspiration, and caring, topics that are often part of nursing and other human services curricula. As van Manen (1990) notes, poems help to expose the tacit and unspoken within the limitation of words. Poems have the potential to communicate the essence of topics that are difficult to write about, including personal beliefs, values, and philosophies. Since the poem that is to be paralleled by the students is written or chosen by the instructor, it gives learners insight into that instructor’s values, priorities, and attitudes. In this way, the parallel poetry activity is also a technique through which instructors share themselves with students. It offers the opportunity for students to come to know their instructor as a caring, compassionate person. PhotostorIes and audIo casts Opportunities for students to get to know their online instructors are often limited. Although a photo of an instructor may accompany each posting in a course forum, the teacher may not become as animated and real to learners as face-to-face instructors are. In order to create an invitational educational milieu, it is important for online teachers to find ways to disclose appropriate personality attributes and personal details to learners to reveal that they are caring individuals. In face-to-face teaching, students hear the instructor’s voice, see how instructors dress and present themselves, and often hear personal details integrated into class discussions or during shared breaks. All of these experiences help learners to know their teachers at an appropriate personal level. To achieve this level of intimacy online, teachers can use self-disclosure through a photostory or an audio cast. A photostory, which is a combination of images and voice, can be created using PowerPoint with voiceover narration or other opensource software programs. The most important consideration in

Lunch with the theorists: a clinical learning assignment.

Applying theoretical knowledge to practice is the heart of clinical teaching and educators need to facilitate students’ personal processes of translating this knowledge in creative, lively, and relevant ways. In the Post LPN to BN program at Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada, we created an assignment in the psychiatric mental health course where students envision what it might be like to engage in lunch conversation with theorists they have only read about. The process of conceptualizing well-known theorists in a familiar every day activity can help de-mystify the ideas these individuals espouse. Rather than simply reiterating information, the assignment requires learners to personalize both the people who created the theories as well as the immediate relevance of the ideas to current practice. The task is only one artifact in a comprehensive portfolio assignment that also includes writing scholarly papers, assessing incidence and prevalence of disease, evaluating referral instruments, practicing with licensing examination questions, and constructing clinical case studies. Balancing these more academic learning activities with a playful affect-centered requirement enhances educational measurement possibilities for clinical instruction and has been well received by students. Inviting Theorists to Lunch