Clinical Appraisal

This episodes discusses the philosophical importance of skepticism in scientific pursuits.

In this episode, Ian speaks with his grandmother, Dianne Lane, a masters-prepared psychiatric nurse and nurse researcher who is now 90 years old. In it, she describes what life was like as a psychiatric nurse pre-psychotropic drugs.

What is an advanced nurse? Is prescription authority synonymous with APRN practice? What constitutes an APN? These are issues dealt with in this episode of the podcast.

In this episode, Ian speaks with National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists (NACNS) President, Dr. Phyllis Whitehead, PhD, APRN/CNS, FAAN, about how she conceptualizes the unique contributions to patient care of CNS trained nurses and how one might differentiate the roles of CNS practitioners from nurse practitioners.

In this conversation, Ian talks with Dr. Stephanie Griggs, PhD, RN, FAAN, a sleep self-management expert in pediatrics, focused on young adult health. Stephanie is an assistant professor of nursing at Case Western Reserve University and an up-and-coming force to be reckoned with in academic sleep and diabetes self-management research. Specifically, Ian and Stephanie talk about her academic traject...

In this episode, Ian discusses the importance of understanding research design and analysis to accurately determine the efficacy of research findings, as well as the frequency with which most research findings are demonstrably proven 'false' over time, according to researchers at Stanford. Additionally, he discusses the impact of clinical scholars understanding how to piece together methodological...

In this episode, Ian details his journey through quantitative health science and how he originally became interested in statistical methods as applied to research on human health.

Reality testing is needed to assess the validity of your abstract constructs, and if it cannot be shown to hold outside of your mental ideals... I am sorry, but it's wrong. We need to go back to the drawing board, in some sense.

In this episode, Ian concludes his arguments from the last year as to why we need a track for the DNP-prepared clinical researcher, separable from PhD-typical training pathways, for nurse scientists at the applied or practice-based setting, by teasing apart many of the usual rebukes of this idea that come from traditionally prepared scientists and skeptics. Rebutting many of these positions, Ian p...

In this episode, Ian discusses the science of labor and delivery with Melissa Anne Dubois, a seasoned L&D nurse and soon-to-be Nursing PhD student. They passionately discuss all things maternal health, in the context of what we can learn from the trials that currently exist and where they tend to fall apart from a nursing perspective and potentially fail millions of women and infants. A dynamic gu...

In this episode, Ian speaks with Dr. Anne Marie Rafferty, a nurse, scholar, educator and historian from the UK, about a 1996 book she published entitled "The Politics of Nursing Knowledge," which was largely predicated on her doctoral dissertation work in medical sociology and modern history. They discuss how the book has shaped her career, her thinking, and where some of the big problems are in n...

In this episode, Ian interviews a Living Legend in Nursing, Dr. Jacqueline Fawcett, PhD, RN, FAAN. Jacqueline is internationally recognized for her work in meta-theoretical underpinnings of nursing science and practice, and has been credited as revivifying a term from the 1970s, "Nursology", as being most appropriate for our discipline, to distinguish it as a discipline similar to biology or psych...

In this episode, Ian responds to a listener question about how he reconciles the apparent contradiction in his recent claims about how most nurses eschew nursing theory so we need to make it more pragmatically relevant to practicing nurses, with the idea that he still finds Nursing Theory to be relevant and important and worth embracing and taking seriously.

In this episode, Ian discusses the importance of clinical trade offs and the implications of the multiplicity problem in terms of real world effects of our overly simplistic theories.

In this episode, Ian details his methodology for reviewing intervention studies, particularly randomized controlled clinical trials (RCT) and other human subjects experiments in the biomedical or biobehavioral sciences. This is merely the method that has worked for him over the years, and provides the most bang for his buck. Others' mileage may vary of course. But these are the pieces at least to...

In this episode, Ian speaks with Dr. Rosemary Taylor, PhD, RN, CNL, an experienced nurse and academic scholar with a wealth of knowledge and an interest in studying interpersonal violence, bullying and other noxious behaviors in the health care environment, particularly amongst nurses. Nurse on nurse "horizontal violence" as she has termed in in her dissertation defense and beyond is a construct w...

In this episode, Ian revisits the notion of number needed to treat (NNT) and absolute risk ratio (ARR) from a few episodes ago, in light of some new claims made about mAb therapies for the treatment of COVID-19 patients, given some of the public support for their early use. As always, the approach taken is a methodological one, and the focus is not on COVID-19 per se.

In this episode, Ian speaks with Dr. Patricia M. Delgado, DNP, APRN, DCNP. Patricia is a DNP-prepared principal investigator with extensive training in adult-gerontological primary care and subspecialty training in dermatology about her journey into clinical research, what hurdles she overcame to be afforded the opportunity to be a PI, and her perspective on the viability of this path for others w...

In this episode, Ian reviews some literature and some questions surrounding the idea of whether quality improvement (QI) projects are just "research lite" or whether they have valid standing in and of themselves apart from research. Many people have written on whether QI is just 'research which doesn't require IRB approval and can't be gneralized,' while others are staunch proponents of the immedi...

In this episode, Ian discusses some methodological challenges in properly interpreting emerging data from the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically surrounding the Delta variant of concern (VOC).

In this episode, Ian takes a more esoteric thought-ride through the bramble of lived experience and shared health-illness experiences to arrive at a tentative conclusion that perhaps the development of a methodology to evaluate the ontological legitimacy of an externally valid measure of shared health-illness experiences is perhaps tenable after all... (then again, this is all just interesting pon...

In this episode, Ian speaks with physical therapist and hip pain researcher extraordinaire, Dr. Marcie Harris-Hayes, PT, DPT, MSCI. Dr. Harris-Hayes is on the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where she advises trainees interested in clinical research and conducts her own independent program of research focused on arthritic and pre-arthritic hip conditions. She has...

In this episode, Ian speaks with Dr. Yvette P. Conley, Ph. D., FAAN of University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing about her experience as a human molecular geneticist working in Nursing Science, to untangle the complexities of symptom development and about nursing research using omics techniques more broadly.

In this episode, Ian speaks with Dr. Angela Starkweather, PHD, ACNP-BC, CNRN, FAAN, Professor of Nursing at UConn School of Nursing and NINR-funded translational pain scientist, about biobehavioral mechanisms of pain and symptom self-management. They also talk at length about maintaining clinical competence as a clinical researcher in nursing science and balancing one's career aspirations across d...

In this episode, Ian speaks with Dr. Theresa A. Koleck, PhD, RN, from University of Pittsburg School of Nursing about her expertise in omics and biomedical informatics. Dr. Koleck recently published a fascinating first-author paper in Nursing Research focused on the use of natural language processing (NLP) in the study of five deliberately selected symptoms. This project was a methodologically-foc...