Conceptualizations of health in nursing practice.

There are many ways of living health as individuals describe it from unique perspectives. With the intent of serving others, healthcare professionals rely on a specific conceptualization of health consistent with a practice methodology. Hence, for the advancement of innovative scientific knowledge health can be viewed from distinct paradigmatic perspectives and must be founded on a congruent ontological-epistemological-methodological link in professional practice. The purpose of this column is to describe conceptualizations of health with congruent practice methodologies from three distinct nursing paradigmatic perspectives. The authors consider that these distinct paradigmatic nursing perspectives offer diverse disciplinary knowledge of social utility to nursing professional practice for the betterment of the ones being served.

[Impact of a fatigue management program in patients on hemodialysis]. / Effet d'un programme de gestion de la fatigue auprès des personnes hémodialysées.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of a fatigue management program on 25 hemodialysis patients regarding their level of fatigue and their rate of satisfaction towards knowledge. The study took place inside a hemodialysis unit in a health care facility located in New Brunswick. This research design was pre-experimental. The before-after design, with only one group of subjects, makes it possible to compare the level of fatigue, as well as the rate of satisfaction towards pre- and post-program knowledge. According to the results of our study, it seems that the subjects, after benefiting from a fatigue management program, managed to significantly decrease their level of fatigue and gain satisfaction related to the acquisition of knowledge. Even though our number of participants was small, our research supports the idea that a fatigue management program can meet the need of fatigue management in this population. The results of this study foresee the need to develop a fatigue management program in hemodialysis units and to evaluate its effectiveness in the medium or long term in selecting quasi-experimental studies, including a broader population of patients.