The Lived Experience of Family Nurse Practitioners Performing Sexual Health Assessments

Sexuality incorporates a multitude of feelings including beliefs, fantasies, and aspects of pleasure, intimacy, and reproduction. In addition, sexuality involves rights to gender identity and role, sexual acts and orientation. Sexual and reproductive health and rights is a global health, development, and human rights priority. Universal access to sexual and reproductive health is essential. Negative sexual health outcomes are increasing in the United States and sexuality is often a neglected area for health providers including nurses. With an increasing share of the primary care services nationally, family nurse practitioners (FNPs) have the means to provide quality sexual health care across the life span and improve universal access and sexual health outcomes. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the lived experiences of female FNPs when performing sexual health assessments on their adult clients in primary care. Family nurse practitioners are educated and trained to provide holistic, client centered nursing care inclusive of sexual health assessments. The study included in-depth interviews with ten female FNPs. These interviews were analyzed using van Manen\u27s interpretive phenomenological approach. The Self-Concept Mode of The Roy Adaptation Model guided this study. Understanding the phenomenon of the lived experience of female FNPs illuminated the common experiences and shared meanings for FNPs. The interpretive statement was: The performance of a sexual health assessment by FNPs on their adult clients in primary care is the development of presence and prudence in relation to their level of their self-concept. Since sexual health affects all human beings, there are global nursing implications for education, practice, and research in understanding the meanings of the essential themes of presence, prudence, and self-concept

CEC Newsletter (Fall 2017)

Topics include: -Summer CDC Interships -Special Needs Expo -Special Needs Summit -Autism Family Fun Da

The Concept of Integration: A Conceptual Critique of Issues Relating to Curriculum, Policy, Planning & Provision for Pupils with Special Educational Needs

This thesis sets out to investigate the concept of integration, with a view to identifying to what degree conceptual misunderstandings, and a lack of clarity about the concept itself and those concepts which underpin it, have led to an exacerbation, a continuation and a legitimation of inferior educational opportunities for those pupils identified as having Special Educational Needs (SEN), in England and Wales. The first part of this work is, therefore, devoted to a critical analysis of the key concepts involved; models of disability; entitlement and empowerment; models of curriculum and the concept of integration itself. The second part of the thesis is concerned with a critical review of recent and current educational policy in education, in the light of this conceptual critique. The Warnock Report (DES 1978) and subsequent policy are critically discussed and evaluated, and current policy is addressed in the form of the 1988 Education Act and its wider implications, and the Code of Practice for SEN introduced in the 1993 Education Act. Finally the issue of teacher education, and in particular current policy in that area, is critically discussed with a view to identifying its potential to address some of the issues raised by the preceding discussion. The underlying rationale for this thesis is that empirical research without a sound conceptual underpinning has proved not only inadequate but often counterproductive in education in general, and in special needs education in particular. Hence the style of the research is largely conceptual, and, while it has been necessary in the critique of current policies and practices to move to a more empirical mode, this has been done to contextualise the discussion by demonstrating the practical inadequacies which have resulted from the lack of conceptual clarity which the research reveals. The major theme which emerges from the thesis is that problems, inequalities and disadvantage in practice in the area of SEN can be seen to be attributable to a lack of any clear understanding or Sound critique of the major concepts which underpin current educational policy in the area

Self and (m)other in Patrick White\u27s fiction : an object relations approach

This thesis offers a new interpretation of Patrick White\u27s novels, using Object Relations psychology. Object Relations psychology differs from Freudian psychology in that it shifts the focus of attention from notions of the Oedipal conflict and repression to issues of nurturing and relationships. This study charts the development of the Whitean protagonist across a selection of novels. The focus of my thesis is White\u27s developing protagonist, and no attempt is made to offer a psychological profile of Patrick White himself. The thesis first surveys a representative sampling of existing critical material. It then defines the theoretical framework of the study and, finally, it applies this framework to the novels

Doubling, splitting and fragmentation in Bleak House

This thesis draws mainly on psychoanalytic theories, and explicates the doubling leitmotiv in Bleak House (1971), which portrays Victorian personality as split and its society as fragmented. This is seen as a suggestion of Dickens\u27 conception of human identity as fragile and vulnerable. Each autonomous character represents a single aspect of personality, so that conflict, when it occurs, is in fact intra-psychic, rather than inter-psychic. The study investigates the problem of the dual or split personality via the quest for identity, and addresses Dickens\u27 perceived need to reward self-effacing characters and punish the assertive. It explores the psychological ramifications of the fragmented personality based on the Object Relations principles of Splitting and Reintegration, and Separation and Individuation, and peruses the realistic development of the characters within psychological parameters. It examines the possibility that, despite Dickens\u27 overt criticism of class divisions and social evils, his ascribing of traits like sexuality and violence to the lower classes, reveals his own ambivalence to class stratifications within Victorian society. The pervasive fog is a metaphor for indifferentiation between various personalities and institutions, and represents both psychic fragmentation and the erosion of law and order and meaning within institutions. The analogous relationship between classes and institutions is discussed in terms of paradigmatic divisions and syntagmatic connections. Special attention is devoted to the submerged dialectic in the dual narrative, under the broad terms of Eros, for the first person feminine narrative and Psyche, for what is considered to be the masculine, omniscient narrator, in order to understand it more fully within the Victorian context of separate spheres for the feminine and masculine, private and public. In concluding, it discusses Dickens\u27 methods of plot and conflict resolution by drawing on his credo of childhood innocence, and the parable of the domestic haven, according to his own peculiar configuration of family