February 2, 2014

To: Mr. William Harkey

From: Natalie N. Painter

Subject: Research Analysis

Two articles selected for review derive from The Journal of Perinatal Education. The first article I read was titled, “Evidence Based Maternity Care: Can New Dogs Learn Old Tricks?” It was written by Merilyn Curl. Curl is a Certified Nurse Midwife, Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator, and a Fellow of the American College of Childbirth Educators. The article illustrates the efforts of reform applied to the founding cultures and purpose given to a modern day Certified Nurse Midwife.

Assessing the Situation

She begins unfolding her story at the time of hire with a concise perspective of the culture and practices of the community hospital she worked for. Curl describes the time old “Nursing Process” as assessing the situation, making a plan, then finally evaluating the outcome. She follows this same progression in her attempt to restructure nursing practices at this community hospital. She very clearly presents her personal experience as what practices (whether or not they were best practices) she was seeing in the nursing community verses research based best nursing practice. One piece of evidence she presents for this is how “This meant that labor nurses were assigned only one patient allowing the time to provide continuous labor support. Despite strong encouragement to remain at the bedside, most nurses remained tethered to the central monitoring station” (p.235). This observation strengthens the argument that research based best practices were not synonymous with current practices.

She presents the proposed research based practices as time old patient centered care and the new accepted practices as being heavily based on technology with little emphasis on patient-nurse relationships. This argument seems completely logical, especially concerning a