Family health history and future nursing practice: Implications for undergraduate nursing students

Creating a family health history interview protocol for use with undergraduate health professional students: A scoping review

Background

Family health history can be used as a health promotion tool to assess health risk, improve data collection and disease prevention, initiate interventions, and motivate behavioral change, but its utility as a public health tool has not been fully explored. Collecting information for a family health history can be a challenging task. However, it is an important skill for undergraduate students to learn, particularly those in pre-health majors. Our aim was to create a family interview protocol for students' successful family health history collection using findings from students' research papers and a scoping review.

Study design

We summarized and listed suggestions from students' papers. Our scoping review followed Arksey and O'Malley's (2005) review process and the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Review checklist (2018).

Methods

We used Medline, CINAHL (EBSCO), ERIC (ProQuest), Web of Science, and Academic Search Premiere databases and Google. Using Covidence, we included peer-reviewed, English, journal articles and grey literature, narrowing our key term combinations to terms like family health history, interview or protocol, and undergraduate or health professional student.

Results

Protocol suggestions included having appropriate settings and preparation to conduct interviews with questions on socio-demographics, cultural and family relationship dynamics, health behaviors, and acute and chronic condition questions for family members. Students' papers addressed preparation for conducting interviews and obtaining better data from existing family trees and extended relatives to maximize learning about risk assessment. The scoping review revealed two themes associated with family health history, including creating genograms and interview methods used with history taking.

Conclusions

Implementing the protocol for future assignments will provide students with a training opportunity to identify their own disease risks, improve their family health history knowledge, and collect family health history data relevant to prevention and interventions focused on understanding chronic conditions and their management.

Exploring the experiences of female undergraduate nursing students in providing home healthcare to older adults

BACKGROUND

In light of the growing ageing population in Saudi Arabia and Saudi nurses' hesitation to work with the older population, it is important to understand the experiences of nursing students on their clinical placement in home healthcare.

METHODS

This study is a descriptive qualitative study based on five focus groups of 3-5 students each. Data were collected from female senior baccalaureate nursing students at a female governmental university in Saudi Arabia, and during their placement in home healthcare. Data were analysed using thematic analysis.

RESULTS

Five main themes emerged : struggling with their own family; struggling with cultural and social beliefs; struggling during clinical training; struggling with domestic caregivers; and reflections for the future were considered important impressions in clinical experience.

CONCLUSION

The culture of Saudi Arabian society is an important factor in shaping the training experience of female nursing students either positively or negatively, specifically in the context of home healthcare nursing for older patients. The results of this study show how important it is for students to be prepared for the clinical environment, the nature of the work, and the role of the home healthcare nurse in order to improve their clinical learning.

Current State of Genomics in Nursing: A Scoping Review of Healthcare Provider Oriented (Clinical and Educational) Outcomes (2012-2022)

In the 20 years since the initial sequencing of the human genome, genomics has become increasingly relevant to nursing. We sought to chart the current state of genomics in nursing by conducting a systematic scoping review of the literature in four databases (2012-2022). The included articles were categorized according to the Cochrane Collaboration outcome domains/sub-domains, and thematic analysis was employed to identify key topical areas to summarize the state of the science. Of 8532 retrieved articles, we identified 232 eligible articles. The articles primarily reported descriptive studies from the United States and other high-income countries (191/232, 82%). More than half (126/232, 54.3%) aligned with the "healthcare provider oriented outcomes" outcome domain. Three times as many articles related to the "knowledge and understanding" sub-domain compared to the "consultation process" subdomain (96 vs. 30). Five key areas of focus were identified, including "nursing practice" (50/126, 40%), "genetic counseling and screening" (29/126, 23%), "specialist nursing" (21/126, 17%), "nurse preparatory education" (17/126, 13%), and "pharmacogenomics" (9/126, 7%). Only 42/126 (33%) articles reported interventional studies. To further integrate genomics into nursing, study findings indicate there is a need to move beyond descriptive work on knowledge and understanding to focus on interventional studies and implementation of genomics into nursing practice.

An empirical study investigating the user acceptance of a virtual conversational agent interface for family health history collection among the geriatric population

Critical for the early diagnosis of genetic disorders, a Family Health History (FHx) can be collected in several ways including electronic FHx tools, which aid easy editing and sharing by linking with other information management portals. The user acceptance of such systems is critical, especially among older adults experiencing motor and cognitive issues. This study investigated two types of FHx interfaces, standard and Virtual Conversational Agent (VCA), using 30 young (between 18 and 30) and 24 older participants (over 60). Workload, usability and performance data were collected. Even though participants required less time to complete three of five tasks on the standard interface, the VCA interface performed better in terms of subjective workload and usability. Additionally, 67% of the older adults preferred the VCA interface since it provided context-based guidance during the data collection process. The results from this study have implications for the use of virtual assistants in FHx and other areas of data collection.