Introduction
Nursing practice today relies heavily on research findings because nursing knowledge is crucial in evidence-based nursing (Houser, 2015). An initial step towards the growth of a data oriented skilled nurses is the acquisition of reliable skills in searching for rich resources of nursing research database online that are readily accessible to budding nursing researchers. The current research paper involves the search of a single clinical research database (CRD) that contains resource materials capable of supporting a larger investigation on the PICOT-guided clinical research question, “Social behavior and engagement outcomes from animal assisted therapy of at least a year among elderly patients with dementia in long-term care facilities”.
The Clinical Research Database
Owner or Publisher of Database: Sigma Theta Tau International, which is located in Indianapolis, IN, and the organizer of the Honor Society of Nursing (VHGNE, 2017)
Findings, Conclusion, and Recommendations
One of the serious issues ran into during the CRD search was the limited accessibility of most university based CRDs (e.g. the Chamberlain College of Nursing database [CCN, 2017]) due to security credentials needed to access these databases. Thus, it is essential that CRD search may de-emphasize private school based CRDs as the primary resource for clinical nursing research in the future in favor of CRDs with open access policies. The CRD featured in this paper is an open access database, which contains a very large database (2,968 pieces) of peer reviewed literature in animal assisted therapy on various clinical conditions, including dementia. These open sources include reports that are downloadable in PDF formats at no cost at all.
References
Chamberlain College of Nursing. (2017). Library database access. Proxy.Chamberlain.edu. Retrieved from: http://proxy.chamberlain.edu:8080/form?qurl=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx.
Houser, J. (2015). Nursing research: Reading, using, and creating evidence (3rd ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett.
VHGNE. (2017). About the Henderson Repository. Nursinglibrary.org. Retrieved from: http://www.nursinglibrary.org/vhl/pages/about.html.
