Approximately 90% of the UK population spend some time in hospital in their final year of life, and more than half of the population die in hospital. This review aims to explore the experiences of general nurses when providing end-of-life care to patients in the acute hospital setting. Nine studies were identified through a literature search, and each was then analysed and evaluated until themes emerged. Six themes were drawn from the literature: lack of education and knowledge, lack of time with patients, barriers arising in the culture of the health-care setting, communication barriers, symptom management, and nurses' personal issues. The themes cause concern about the quality of end-of-life care being provided in the acute care setting. The literature appears to be consistent in the view that terminally ill patients are best cared for in specialised care settings, such as palliative care units and hospices. However, increasing demands on health services will result in greater numbers of dying patients being admitted to the acute hospital setting. It is therefore paramount that general nurses' educational needs are met to ensure they develop clinical competence to provide high-quality holistic end-of-life care.

Aim.  This article presents a discussion on how to maximize nursing students’ learning about research for evidence‐based practice in undergraduate, preregistration programmes. Background.  Evidence‐based practice may use information from many sources, including research. Research utilization concerns the translation of research findings into practice. Thus, while evidence‐base practice may not be solely research‐based and hence more than research utilization, research remains an important ingredient in ensuring quality and cost‐effective care and an academic requirement for nursing students undertaking a science degree‐level qualification. Nevertheless, how educators can best support research‐related learning and application remains uncertain and requires discussion. Data sources.  MEDLINE, CINAHL, Social Science Citation Index, British Nursing Index, and Intute were searched for papers published 1980–2011 using the following search terms: research, research utilization, evidence‐based practice, learning, teaching, education, training, nursing, health, and social care. Discussion.  Nursing students need to be able to value the relevance, authority, and utility of nursing research for patient care through embedding research learning in both academic and practice‐based settings. Students can be supported in learning how to access, understand, and appraise the authority of research through weaving these skills into enquiry‐based learning. Furthermore, encouraging students to undertake research‐based practice change projects can support research utilization and development skills. Conclusion.  Research should be fully embedded throughout nursing curricula beyond the confines of ‘research classes’, integrating learning in academic and practice‐based settings. Although this requires synergistic and integrated support of student learning by nurse educators, managers, clinical practitioners, researchers and policymakers; nurse educators have a pivotal role.

In this article the authors discuss the usefulness of focus groups for researching sensitive issues using evidence from a study examining the experiences of nurses providing care in the context of the Northern Ireland Troubles. They conducted three group interviews with nurses during which they asked about the issues the nurses face(d) in providing nursing care amid enduring social division. Through a discursive analysis of within-group interaction, they demonstrate how participants employ a range of interpretive resources, the effect of which is to prioritize particular knowledge concerning the nature of nursing care. The identification of such patterned activity highlights the ethnographic value of focus groups to reveal social conventions guiding the production of accounts but also suggests that accounts cannot be divorced from the circumstances of their production. Consequently, the authors argue that focus groups should be considered most useful for illuminating locally sanctioned ways of talking about sensitive issues.

Monads for global state and local state have been used to provide semantics of programming languages for many years. There is a computationally natural presentation of an ordinary Lawvere theory that corresponds to the monad on Set for global state, inevitably called the Lawvere theory for global state. Here, we introduce a notion of indexed Lawvere theory and use it to give a Lawvere-style account of local state, extending the theorem for global state to local state. En route, we develop the notion of comodel of a Lawvere theory and exploit a universal characterisation of the category of worlds for local state. Ultimately, we give both syntactic and semantic characterisations of the operation block that allows one to move between worlds and use them to characterise the monad for local state.

"Travellers leaving Northern Ireland's air and sea ports at the end of the New Year holiday period 1988 were contacted as a means of identifying potential out-migrants. The method proved to be highly cost effective and reasonably successful. One thousand individuals who had either lived or had been born in Northern Ireland but who were now residing outside the province were obtained from 1,702 traveller contacts. The paper discusses the problems surrounding the representativeness of this sample of emigrants and outlines possible strategies for their resolution. The more significant results of a brief questionnaire survey about migrant origins, destinations, characteristics, motivations and intentions are also presented." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND GER)