Meeting Student Learning Outcomes

The first student learning outcome for this course has been met through critically evaluating the current nursing practice in the U.S. that has identified nurses’ burnout as a serious issue facing healthcare facilities in the U.S.  The discovery has informed and culminated in the formulation of a proposed research study that seeks to understand and mitigate the thorny issue of nurses’ burnout in healthcare facilities in the U.S. The action will help to meet the second learning outcome requiring ‘evaluating research as the basis of decision making to improve outcomes through translation into evidence-based practice. The third course learning outcome requiring students to synthesize and get an understanding of the research process has been attained through the selection of the quantitative research method proposed as the design for undertaking the study. The selection of the quantitative methodology was informed by the fact that “the researcher adopts a distant and noninteractive posture with the subject to prevent bias” (Grove, Burns & Gray, 2013). 

While trying to minimize the possible bias that could emanate from the proposed study, the fourth learning outcome requiring students to ‘investigate ethical issues related to the conduct of scientific research’ is also fulfilled, because biasness is one of the major ethical issues that affects the credibility and reliability of a study. The ethical issue of informed consent has also been learnt and incorporated into the proposed study, considering informed consent must be obtained from the study subjects, before ‘conducting one-on-one interviews with participants using a set of standardized questions’. The confidentiality and privacy of the human subjects will also be protected through anonymous coding and use of pseudonyms to identify subjects instead of their real names. 

Further, the fifth learning outcome requiring the exploration of ‘national and international initiatives and research priorities’, has been attained through adopting the Maslach’s theory of burnout as a guiding proposition for the proposed study. The Maslach’s theory of burnout incorporates an international framework of key characteristics of emotional exhaustion that may affect the capacity of nurses to deal with the physical, as well as the emotional aspects of their work (Ndawula, 2016). The incorporation of the theory as a guiding proposition for the proposed study therefore seeks to ensure that the study outcomes will meet both the national and international research initiatives. Moreover, the adoption of simple random sampling strategy seeks to confer in into this proposed study, the international research priority of ensuring all research subjects are given equal chances to participate in the proposed study.