Analysis of Military Nursing Practice Study Data Collected in Iraq

Purpose: With increased demand for nursing care to be evidence based, questions arise whether existing evidence can safely be applied to the modern battlefield.  The specific aims of this study were to analyze the captured accounts of battlefield nursing care and to use that information to establish a list of research and evidence based practice projects (EBPPs).

Design: Qualitative descriptive 

Methods: Through focus groups, participants were asked to describe battlefield-nursing care by recounting how it was the same and/or different from care they delivered before they deployed.  They were also asked how much of their care in Iraq they considered to be based on existing evidence.  Finally, they were asked to recommend 2-3 nursing research studies and EBPPs.  Using the results of the focus group analysis, an expert panel generated a prioritized list of researchable categories and proposed examples of feasible studies and EBPPs that can be used to guide military nurse scientists.

Sample: 11 focus groups (83 informants) of nurses from all combat support hospital sites in Iraq (11 sites).

Analysis:  Guided by naturalistic inquiry framework, content analysis was used to inductively examine previously collected data.

Findings:  The expert panel members ranked the resultant categories in the following order:  

Implications for Military Nursing:  Using battlefield generated accounts to guide military nurse scientists’ work has the potential to improve the quantity and quality of studies.

Final Report is available on NTRL: https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDetail/PB2012107...