1. FEASIBILITY STUDY
When thinking about a research question to write for the feasibility study I had
to think about whattopics were currently relevant to nursing practice in Adult
nursing as well as in the popular news. As patient privacy and dignity are very
big issues within the NHS right now it has become very high priority part as the
essence of care. One question which occurred to me was, ‘Is patients’ dignity
compromised on mixed-sex wards?’ Working on placements I saw for myself
the importance of single sex wards and observed from the patients’ point of
view that it was lessembarrassing for them and therefore makes the healing
environment a better place.
Therefore, I started to look at the research that surrounded the subject and my
chosen question. I also thought about how I was going to undertake the
research so that it was valid, relevant, from both primary and secondary
sources and unbiased. As Punch asks ‘what is its purpose and what is it trying
to achieve?’ (Punch, 2000). (Leliopoulou 2011)When thinking about my
question I thought it would be useful for what is happening within the NHS at
the moment. Also what would be the best approach to this type of study? As
anurse I wanted to understand the research behind issues of privacy and
dignity and changing modern cultural sensitivity to these areas.
When deciding how to conduct the literature search, there are two types of
strategy to choose from suchas PICO and SPICE. As this is a qualitative study,
based on gathering opinions and views, I used PICO which is the acronym for:
P- Patient/Population meaning who or what? I- intervention meaning how? C-
Comparison meaning what is the main alternative? O - Outcome meaning
whatis they trying to accomplish, measure, improve, effect? (Leliopoulou.
2011). This allows you to take a more evidence-based approach to the
literature and also allows you to use databases such as MEDLINE or CINHAL.
So I went onto the university databasesand eventually settled on CINHALas it
has the largest choice of journals to choosefrom,although MEDLINE did come
up with the same articles. The key words I put in were the key words from my
chosen question, so: ‘dignity’, ‘patients’, ‘mixed-sex wards’, ‘nurses’ and
‘compromised’. From the table below (Table 1) it is obvious that initially I used

2. the word OR in the search terms and it gave me an overwhelming number of
results. When I narrowed it by changing the word to AND it gave me 9 hits that
included all the key words I was interested in. I read the abstracts of each of
these 9, and saw that 4 of them did not really address all the issues taken
together that I was interested in. For example one of these had picked up on
the words ‘patient’ and ‘dignity’ but were concerned with colon-rectal wards
and the dignity of the patients undergoing that kind of surgery. So I was able
to eliminate them as not being relevant.
Table 1. Showing research results.
The five articles chosen were as follows: ‘Mixed-sex wards and patient dignity:
nurses’ and patients’ perspectives’ by L Baillie; ’Mixed- sex wards: the choice of
patients?’ by no authors given; ‘No mixed sex please…. Mixed-sex wards’ by A
Cole;’ Improving patients’ privacy and dignity on mixed-sex wards, by N Hairon.
And finally Experience of mixed-sex bays in a general hospital’ by D Bryant; J
Adams. The abstracts of all these five articles are in Appendix 1.
All these five articles satisfy the guidelines for literature reviews in that they
focus directly on my research question and they were all up to datebaraing
two of them, written by academics or nursing/medical professionals; they
were peer reviewed and were all based on qualitative methodology, using
semi-structured interviews and observations, talking to patients and staff to
gather their perspectives, referring to thefour ‘ps’ People, Progress, Problems
and phenomenon. (Leliopoulou 2011).
These articles all used evidence from general and surgical wards, mostly
gathering information from randomly chosen patients using ethical

3. considerations, all were based on actual interviews that did not rely on leading
questions. The majority overall indicated that patients of all ages and sexes
prefer to be in single sex wards. From the point of view of nurses interviewed
they felt that it would also make their jobs easier and more focussed on the
needs of both sexes if they were on separate wards. In short therefore, these
five articles provided reliable evidence for the feasibility of a dissertation on
this research question.
To conclude, when I began the research I still didn’t feel confident that I
understood the process of looking for relevant and valid literature that I
needed. However, after spending time in the library and having being shown
how to conduct a literature search, it made it much easier to undertake. As
mentioned, I also learned from trial and error which search terms worked and
which yielded too many hits, and needed narrowing down. Above all, I realise
that it took much more time than I had expected to go through the databases,
read the abstracts, research primary and secondary sources and do
background reading. For example, I used The Guardian news archive to look
into the historical background to this issue and found that in 1997 Blair’s
government did consider the possibility of changing all hospitals to single-sex
wards (Fleming 2007). Finally, on reflection, I do feel that when conducting a
dissertation in the future I will be more confident about the process to
undertake, the time to allow for the different stages, the availability of
databases and the importance of choosing the right search engine and
identifying a rich and relevant research topic.