When supported by their practice environments, nurses employ practices that can assist in interrupting medication errors before they reach the patients.

The aim of this research innovation was to foster an understanding of women's experiences with menopause by exploring the interrelation between the knowledge in the scientific/medical discourses, both past and present, and the knowledge in the everyday discourses of a select sample of midlife women regarding the closure of menstrual life. The significance of this study is that it provides a social, historical, and cultural horizon from which to begin to understand the experiences of menopause. By developing an alternative knowledge of menopause, this research challenges the prevailing discourses of menopause, resists the way these discourses have solidified into what is accepted as truth, and makes visible the links among values, assumptions, research, and knowledge.

The purpose of this grounded theory study was to gain a deeper understanding of older Korean American women's experiences of chronic osteoarthritic pain. The data included a set of 3 interviews with 7 women over age 60, field notes, observations, memos, and the literature about the chronic pain of osteoarthritis. Through constant comparative analysis and coding typical of grounded theory, a five-stage process emerged inductively from the data. The core variable, Reconstructing a Meaning of Pain, included the concepts of the process in the grounded theory through which the women learned to manage and tolerate the pain. During this process, the women came to perceive their pain as a component of aging rather than as a symptom of disease.

Nurse scholars often debate such technical issues as when to use quantitative or qualitative methods or some combination of methods. The proper focus of a discussion on nursing science should be the basic assumptions and values of various approaches to research. Unless we gain an awareness and appreciation of the human process of knowledge generation, our research questions will remain limited, and nursing practice will be shaped in ways that may be neither coherent nor consistent with our philosophies of nursing. Used to demonstrate this position, is the knowledge of menopause gleaned through a philosophical inquiry of the biomedical and sociocultural approaches to menopause research.

In this article, we describe the depth of knowledge and skill nurses used in making decisions regarding the safe processes and practices of medication administration. Using grounded theory, we identified the essence of medication safety by nurses as the theme of clinical reasoning. Nurses used two medication safety processes within the clinical reasoning theme-maintaining medication safety and managing the environment-together with six categories of patient-focused medication safety practices in the first process and four categories of environmental-focused safety practices within the second process. These processes and practices present an emerging model of safe medication administration developed from the narratives of 50 medical-surgical nurses. This model provides researchers with the basis for the development of systemic policies for safer medication administration for patients. Health care professional educators might also find the results useful in developing curricula focused on patient safety as the foundation of quality care.