RN-BSN Library Guide
Key Definitions
- Where can I find definitions for terms commonly used in IHP-501?What are etiology and symptomology?
What are clinical symptoms?
What is a case study?
What is quantitative evidence?
What is a complementary or integrative health intervention?
What is a conventional intervention?
What is a health challenge?
Definitions and Examples
Case Study: Case study is a research methodology, typically seen in social and life sciences. There is no one definition of case study research. However, very simply… ‘a case study can be defined as an intensive study about a person, a group of people or a unit, which is aimed to generalize over several units’. A case study has also been described as an intensive, systematic investigation of a single individual, group, community or some other unit in which the researcher examines in-depth data relating to several variables. See examples and explanation in: Case StudiesThis link opens in a new window
Clinical Symptoms: A symptom is a manifestation of disease apparent to the patient himself, while a sign is a manifestation of disease that the health provider perceives. The sign is objective evidence of disease; a symptom, subjective. Symptoms represent the complaints of the patient. Chronic kidney disease (newly identified): Clinical presentation and diagnostic approach in adults This link opens in a new window.
Complementary or Integrative Health intervention: This link opens in a new window emphasizes multimodal interventions, which are two or more interventions such as conventional health care approaches (like medication, physical rehabilitation, psychotherapy), and complementary health approaches (like acupuncture, yoga, and probiotics) in various combinations, with an emphasis on treating the whole person rather than, for example, one organ system. See Complementary, Alternative, or Integrative Health This link opens in a new window
Conventional intervention: conventional medical practices including medications, physical rehabilitation, and/or psychotherapy focusing on specific individual body systems sometimes referred to as Western medicine.
Etiology: the study of the causes of diseases or the cause of a disease. The study of the processes by which a disease is caused and transmitted, including the pathogens involved. Adjectives: etiologic, etiological. Example of etiology related to a specific disease see: Etiology of depression This link opens in a new window
Morbidity: the state of being ill or having a disease. See Morbidity This link opens in a new window
Prevalence: a measure of morbidity based on current levels of disease in a population, estimated either at a particular time )point prevalence) or over a stated period (period prevalence). It can be expressed either in terms of affected people (persons) or epidsodes of sickness per 1000 individuals at risk. See Prevalence This link opens in a new window
Symptomology: the branch of medicine concerned with the study and classification of the symptoms of disease. Example of symptomology in a disease see: Symptomology of West Nile Virus This link opens in a new window
Concise Medical Dictionary by Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 9780198836612Publication Date: 2020Written by a team of medical experts, this market-leading dictionary offers clear and authoritative definitions for all aspects of medical science. It features up-to-date coverage of public health medicine, medical research and general practice, drugs and pharmacology, endocrinology, cardiology and radiology, among other specialist areas.
Credible Sources
Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines the word credible This link opens in a new window as "offering reasonable grounds for being believed." A credible source, then, is one that you can reasonably believe to be true.
You can use the following five criteria to help you determine if the source offers those "reasonable grounds" for credibility:
- Currency: Is the content presented current enough for your project?
- Relevancy: Does it answer your question or contribute to your research?
- Accuracy: Is the information provided correct?
- Authority: Does the author have expertise on the topic about which he/she is writing?
- Purpose or Objectivity: Is there bias or a slant given to the information provided?
For more information on evaluating sources, check out our Evaluating Sources guide and the Source Evaluation Rubric.
References
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Credible. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved January 4, 2020, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/credible
Scholarly vs. Popular Sources
What's the different between scholarly and popular sources? Watch this video to find out:
Are All Library Resources Scholarly?
No, not all resources you'll find at the library are scholarly.
In many cases, the books you get from the library and articles you find in the library's research databases are scholarly. These sources have often gone through a traditional editorial or peer review process, which means that someone or some group has checked all the facts and arguments the author made and deemed them suitable for publishing. However, you still have to think about whether the book or article is current, objective, and relevant enough for your research.
The library does subscribe to some non-scholarly publications such as popular magazines like People, Vogue, and Ebony. Some library databases include non-scholarly publications like newspapers and trade magazines as well so no matter where you're searching for information you should always evaluate your sources for their relevancy, currency, objectiveness, authoritativeness, and accuracy.
Check out the video below for more information:
Levels of Evidence
Even among scholarly sources, there are differences in the kinds of methods used to collect data and create knowledge, and these levels of evidence are ranked. Some levels of evidence will be insufficient for certain purposes. Watch the video below to learn more.
British Healthcare System
- At Breaking Point or Already Broken? The National Health Service in the United Kingdom-article This link opens in a new windowPerspective article by medical professionals on concerns and shortcomings of the NHS.
- British National Health Service Website This link opens in a new windowThe NHS is working hard to improve opportunities for patients to make choices about their care.
- A Comparative Analysis of the US and UK Health Care Systems This link opens in a new windowFor the first time in 20 years of polling by Gallup, less than half of Americans considered the quality of healthcare in the US to be excellent/good in 2021. As for the UK in 2021, the King’s Fund measured the largest decline in the overall satisfaction rate with the National Health Service (the nationwide healthcare system in the UK) since the 90s. Given bed shortages, staff shortages, overwhelmed ER departments, and a general lack of adequate infrastructure afflicted both the US and the UK, an analysis of these healthcare systems during the pandemic would demonstrate what many headlines have already pointed out: neither country was as prepared as it should have been (The Economist, 2023).
Suggested Databases
- Health & Medical Collection - ProQuest This link opens in a new windowHealth and medical full-text journals focusing on many medical disciplines and specialties
- Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition - EBSCO This link opens in a new windowProvides scholarly, full-text journals focusing on many medical disciplines and abstracts and indexing for over 550 journals
- CINAHL Complete - EBSCO This link opens in a new windowMost comprehensive nursing and allied health database. CINAHL covers nursing, biomedicine, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and 17 allied health disciplines.
- Oxford Academic This link opens in a new windowOxford University Press research platform with access to scholarly and academic books and journals. Includes access to the following collections and more.
Oxford Library of Psychology This link opens in a new window
Oxford Medical Handbooks This link opens in a new window
Oxford Medical Textbooks This link opens in a new window
Further Reading
- 2021 Global Nutrition ReportThis resource provides data concerning the state of global diet and nutrition with the goal of supporting timely, evidence-based, and effective action to end poor diets and malnutrition.
- The Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and AccountabilityThis resource presents the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS) used by humanitarian aid groups globally to promote equitable and collaborative relations between people and communities and those working to support them. With the goal of addressing power imbalances, the CHS includes nine commitments to people affected by crises that are intended to ensure that organizations respect the rights and dignity of those they support and promote their primary role in finding solutions to the crises they face.
- Health Equity Assessment ToolkitThis webpage from the WHO site features the Health Equity Assessment Toolkit (HEAT). This toolkit provides several datasets that can be used to help you assess health inequality among different countries.
- Health Inequality Data RepositoryThis webpage from the World Health Organization (WHO) defines disaggregated data that demonstrates how health or other aspects of life are experienced by people of different ages, economic status, education levels, place of residence, sex and other characteristics – are vital parts of advancing equity. It also connects you to resources to help you explore health inequality evidence, monitoring, resources, tools, and training. You may use these resources as you assess health inequality as you explore different countries.
- The Impact of Individualized Complementary and Integrative Health Interventions Provided in Clinical Settings on Quality of Life: A Systematic Review of Practice-Based ResearchThis resource reports the results of a systematic review that evaluated the impact of individualized CIH interventions on quality-of-life outcomes in outpatient clinics. It found that CIH therapies have beneficial effects on health-related quality of life and well-being in various patient populations, including those with pain, cancer, and veterans.
- Innovation in Humanitarian Assistance—A Systematic Literature ReviewThis resource identifies key concepts, definitions, and themes in humanitarian innovation (HI) research. It includes a systematic review of the scholarly literature on HI, concluding that efforts to reform the humanitarian system by leveraging innovation have suffered several weaknesses that have limited the possibility of transformative change. The authors propose a new conceptual framework for HI, involving the institutions, actors, contextual factors, and outputs of humanitarian aid systems.
- Making Decisions for Effective Humanitarian Actions: A Conceptual Framework for Relief DistributionThis resource develops an integrative framework for distributing essential relief goods to people affected by disasters. Based on a systematic review of the scholarly literature and with the goal of increasing understanding of the humanitarian domain, the authors identify problem areas related to relief distribution and the linkages between them and synthesize the findings into a new conceptual framework validated by a panel of experienced field experts who work in relief distribution.
- Performance Evaluation in Humanitarian Operations Based on the Beneficiary PerspectiveThis Shapiro Library resource recommends criteria for evaluating humanitarian efforts from the perspective of those receiving aid (beneficiaries) and proposes a taxonomy for evaluating stakeholders. It includes a systematic literature review that identifies areas to analyze the performance of humanitarian interventions, such as housing, health, education, socioeconomic factors, care, and risk management.
- Strategic Framework for Early Recovery, Risk Reduction, and Resilience (ER4)This resource presents the strategic framework of USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA). The framework provides guidance on approaches and programming in the areas of early recovery, risk reduction, and resilience (ER4). It aims to improve the well-being of vulnerable people in the context of evolving humanitarian assistance needs characterized by climate change, complex and protracted crises, global migration, urbanization, and the rise of infectious disease outbreaks and global pandemics
Building a High-Value Health System by
Countries and institutions worldwide face the challenge of planning and paying for health care that effectively meets the needs of citizens and employees. While there are many criticisms of existing healthcare models, current literature offers little guidance for individuals who want to carryout the work of redesigning and improving their health system.Using a step-by-step format, Building a High-Value Health System systematically provides analytical tools and functional skills for designing and implementing a health system that fits a population's needs. Active, learner-directed methods teach readers how to assess the needs of a population,analyze the performance of a health system, assess available capacity, and develop system design options that are feasible within this context. The book then describes the strategies through which change agents can implement and sustain these systems in the future.Through global case studies and detailed guidance, Building a High-Value Health System prepares readers to analyze and understand their own health system and take actions to build a better one.
Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 9780197528549Publication Date: 2021
Global Health for All by
Global Health for All trains a critical lens on global health to share the stories that global health's practices and logics tell about 20th and 21st century configurations of science and power. An ethnography on multiple scales, the book focuses on global health's key epistemic and therapeutic practices like localization, measurement, triage, markets, technology, care, and regulation. Its roving approach traverses policy centers, sites of intervention, and innumerable spaces in between to consider what happens when globalized logics, circulations, and actors work to imagine, modify, and manage health. By resting in these in-between places, Global Health for All simultaneously examines global health as a coherent system and as a dynamic, unpredictable collection of modular parts.
Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 9781978827448Publication Date: 2022
Handbook of Global Urban Health by
Through interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives, and with an emphasis on exploring patterns as well as distinct and unique conditions across the globe, this collection examines advanced and cutting-edge theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the health of urban populations. Despite the growing interest in global urban health, there are limited resources available that provide an extensive and advanced exploration into the health of urban populations in a transnational context. This volume offers a high-quality and comprehensive examination of global urban health issues by leading urban health scholars from around the world. The book brings together a multi-disciplinary perspective on urban health, with chapter contributions emphasizing disciplines in the social sciences, construction sciences and medical sciences. The co-editors of the collection come from a number of different disciplinary backgrounds that have been at the forefront of urban health research, including public health, epidemiology, geography, city planning and urban design. The book is intended to be a reference in global urban health for research libraries and faculty collections. It will also be appropriate as a text for university class adoption in upper-division under-graduate courses and above. The proposed volume is extensive and offers enough breadth and depth to enable it to be used for courses emphasizing a U.S., or wider Western perspective, as well as courses on urban health emphasizing a global context.
Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 9781315465449Publication Date: 2019
Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion by
The Second Edition of this forward-thinking text goes beyond the discussion of health disparities to highlight the importance of health equity. As the new title suggests, Health Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: Context, Controversies, and Solutions helps the reader understand key social justice issues relevant to health disparities and/or health equity, taking the reader from the classroom to the real world to implement new solutions.Key Features:- Two new chapters: one on the impact of urban education on urban health (Ch 4) and another covering the elderly and health equity (Ch 10)- Updated and enhanced coverage on men's health, demographic data, the importance of cultural proficiency, maternal mortality and Black women, and much more.- Current trends and movements, including the role of social media in the provision of health care information for improved health literacy; mass incarceration and criminal justice reform; and new efforts toward resolving health disparities.- Case studies and problems that engage students in thinking about health disparities/equity and diversity issues and prompt them to consider possible solutions.
Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 9781284197792Publication Date: 2020
The Work of Hospitals by
In the context of neoliberalism and global austerity measures, health care institutions around the world confront numerous challenges in attempting to meet the needs of local populations. Examples from Africa (including, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Congo), Latin America (Peru, Mexico, Guatemala), Western Europe (France, Greece), and the United States illustrate how hospitals play a significant role in the social production of health and disease in the communities where they are. Many low-resource countries have experienced increasing privatization and dysfunction of public sector institutions such as hospitals, and growing withdrawal of funding for non-profit organizations. Underlying the chapters in The Work of Hospitals is a fundamental question: how do hospitals function lacking the medications, equipment and technologies, and personnel normally assumed to be necessary? This collection of ethnographies demonstrates how hospital administrators, clinicians, and other staff in hospitals around the world confront innumerable risks in their commitment to deliver health care, including civil unrest, widespread poverty, endemic and epidemic disease, and supply chain instability. Ultimately, The Work of Hospitals documents a vast gulf between the idealized mission of the hospital and the implementation of this mission in everyday practice. Hospitals thus become "contested space" between policy and practice.
Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 9781978823075Publication Date: 2022
