Volume 24, Issue 1, 2002

The Mary Glover Lecture: A nursing odyssey

Anne Sutherland Boal, RN, MHSA

Abstract

Anne Sutherland Boal, as the Mary Glover Lecturer, presented the following text in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the conference of the Canadian Association of Neuroscience Nurses in June 2002.

I am very pleased to be here today as you come together to begin the 33rd Annual General Meeting and Scientific Sessions of the Canadian Association of Neuroscience Nurses (CANN). During the eight years that I worked at British Columbia’s (BC) Children’s Hospital here in Vancouver, there were a number of nurses on our neurosciences unit who were actively involved in CANN. I came to appreciate, through their activities, the advantages that involvement brought to their career development, as well as the excellence that it brought to the care those nurses provided to the children and families. I am very pleased to note that in the sessions this year there are a number of familiar names to me.

AXON, 24(1), 12–17.

Narratives of patients with skull base tumours and their family members: Lessons for nursing practice

M. Anne Wyness, RN, MN, Margaret Borozny Durity, RN, MSN, and Felix Durity, MD, FRCSC

Abstract

The meaning of the experience of being told you or a gamily member have/has a serious brain tumour was revealed during a descriptive research study conducted to determine pre-operative education needs. Eighteen patients and 15 family members participated immediately following the office visit with the neurosurgeon and/or on admission to hospital, for a total of 29 interviews and 13 questionnaires. Twenty-four interviews were conducted with 13 patients and 11 family members in the pre-discharge phase of the research. The key themes of hearing the news, education needs and information needs were identified through content analysis of transcribed interviews and questionnaire data.

Patients and family members portrayed experiences, revealed emotions related to hearing the news, and shared ways of coping. Interviews with patients and their family members that contained clear narratives were identified. From these interviews, three sets of narratives were selected. Each of the narratives was analyzed to determine how the patients and their key family members articulated and made sense of the diagnosis and surgical treatment of a skull base tumour. The themes of a sense of comfort, the known is better than the unknown, waiting for news of the surgical outcome, and quality of recovery emerged from the analysis. Lessons learned about the individuality of patients’ and family members’ needs and approaches to support effective coping were identified.

AXON, 24(1), 18–35.

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