Free Custom «Patients and Their Relevant Diseases» Essay Paper

This paper will manifestly respond to the set of questions pertaining to the two studies regarding cancerous patients and their relevant diseases. The main focus of this paper deals with the statistical analysis of the data collected, how it was sought to come up with a thorough evaluation of the study area. These studies endeavor to improve the approaches used to take care of patients. Various infected and affected parties were engaged to shed some light on the studies. The information was induced and deduced in appropriate situations so as to authenticate the data collected.

1. The data collection methodology employed in this study was personal interviews, whereby the RA HHA interviewed the patients independently to acquire the demographic information. The caregivers were also interviewed simultaneously by the RA nurse. The instruments used were: a numeric rating scale (NRS), whereby patients were asked to orally rate their pain intensity, a dyspnea intensity scale to evaluate the dyspnea intensity, and the Constipation Assessment Scale (CAS)to determine the presence and intensity of constipation. Also, the Memorial Symptom Assessment Scale (MSAS)was used to measure the distress caused by all symptoms, and the Hospice Quality-of-Life Index (HQLI)that includes three aspects of overall QOL was applied as well.
2. The authors authenticated the reliability and validity of their instruments by giving reasons for each one. The NRS was easy to use by debilitated patients and correlated well with the measures of pain intensity; the test-retest reliability of the dyspnea intensity scale ranged from 0.89-0.92 and the simultaneous validity with other measures ranged from 0.88-0.94. For the CAS, its test-retest with a brief delay offered a strong proof of reliability. The MSAS validity was supported by high correlations with the clinical status and the QOL; and the HQLI was able to distinguish between hospice patients and apparently healthy controls using the discriminate, while its reliability was provided by generation of coefficient alphas for the total scale scores and subscale scores.
3. The authors had to visit many households to seek the information from several caregivers and dyads which became tiresome. The caregivers in the intervention group received three visits during the nine-day’ intervention from an experienced RA nurse. This could be minimized by engaging more professional nurses and encouraging the caregivers to cooperate during the data collection. The interference by hospice staff members might have occurred at some point but this was minimized by instructing them to refer to anybody questioning on the study to the RA intervention nurse.
4. The hospice patients were aged roughly 70, and were mostly males, and had a higher school education, the PPS scores of 50, and the SPMSQ scores of less than 9 points. The COPE intervention had a positive result on the overall symptom distress of patients with cancer in the hospice care. This was because of the stability maintenance in the patients’ symptom intensity. Extremely ill patients who were admitted to the hospice but participated in the study were likely to die before all the data were collected. 63% of hospice patients were aged 75 or older and all the studied patients were receiving home care compared to 96% of patients nationally.
5. The variables studied were the intensity of pain, dyspnea, and constipation, the overall symptom distress, and the quality of life (QOL).
6. Yes, inferential tests were used in the analysis of this study. The researchers employed random effects regression models to the data so as to scrutinize some longitudinal changes in the outcomes across the three measurement times.
7. There was the use of tables, a line graph and a flow chart. The three methods of the data presentation were skillfully chosen and perfectly presented according to the data. The flow chat clearly shows the progression of patients in the study; the tables were used to present interdependent variables in a meaningful and comparative way; while the line graphs were used for comparison purposes.