Abstract Aim: To summarise and critique the research literature about whistleblowing and nurses.
Whistleblowing is identified as a crucial issue in maintenance of healthcare standards and nurses are frequently involved in whistleblowing events. Despite the importance of this issue, to our knowledge an evaluation of this body of the data-based literature has not been undertaken.
An integrative literature review approach was used to summarise and critique the research literature. A comprehensive search of five databases including Medline, CINAHL, PubMed and Health Science: Nursing/Academic Edition, and Google, were searched using terms including: 'Whistleblow*,' 'nurs*.' In addition, relevant journals were examined, as well as reference lists of retrieved papers. Papers published during the years 2007-2013 were selected for inclusion.
Fifteen papers were identified, capturing data from nurses in seven countries. The findings in this review demonstrate a growing body of research for the nursing profession at large to engage and respond appropriately to issues involving suboptimal patient care or organisational wrongdoing.
Nursing plays a key role in maintaining practice standards and in reporting care that is unacceptable although the repercussions to nurses who raise concerns are insupportable. Overall, whistleblowing and how it influences the individual, their family, work colleagues, nursing practice and policy overall, requires further national and international research attention.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 8. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 12 October 2022.
All research outputs
#4,290,171
of 23,509,982 outputs
Outputs from Contemporary Nurse
#75
of 518 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#60,284
of 356,369 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Contemporary Nurse
#20
of 157 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 23,509,982 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 81st percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 518 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 5.5. This one has done well, scoring higher than 85% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 356,369 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 82% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 157 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 87% of its contemporaries.
