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Treatment of Patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction Essay

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This paper will critique a quantitative research study (Lesnecki, 2010) that examined influences of individuals that delayed seeking treatment during an acute myocardial infarction (AMI). The article examined psychosocial and environmental influences that may have played a role for the period of AMI symptom onset to actually obtaining medical treatment. The research study will be reviewed looking at background, study purpose, design and methodology, data analysis, results, discussion, limitations, and applications for nursing practice. Background Lesnecki (2010) gave a brief literature review and described the magnitude of the problem with treatment delay in patients with AMI. She touched on the prevalence of treatment delay in …show more content…

She used secondary analysis, by retrospectively gathering patient characteristics obtained from medical records. One group of participants was studied at two points in time, first, by looking back at admission medical records, and secondly, by face to face interview after admission to the hospital. This was not a randomized clinical trial with a treatment and control group, and there was no manipulation of an independent variable. Therefore, blinding was not appropriate for this study. All participants received treatment for their AMI, but the treatment was not a variable that was studied. The author was interested in studying the factors that surrounded any delay of treatment. Therefore, experimental and quasi-experimental research designs would not have been appropriate for this study, in this author’s view. The researcher wanted to identify influences and examine relationships, as well as determine frequency of those variables, suggesting to this writer that a descriptive, comparative design was appropriate for the study. Sample The population studied (Lesnecki, 2010) was clearly identified as a convenience sample, with data obtained from “three Northeastern Pennsylvania hospitals” (p. 186). The weakness of a convenience sample is that it can be difficult to control for biases. The author tried to reduce bias in her sample by using inclusion and exclusion criteria, which narrowed membership of the

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