A Nurse Manager in a Trauma Intensive Care Unit Conducts

A nurse manager in a trauma intensive care unit conducts a quality improvement evaluation project. During this process, the manager discovers that patients with adult respiratory distress syndrome almost always have better outcomes when they are placed in the five beds located furthest away from the nursing station. Examining the data, the manager discovers that the room doors in these five rooms are consistently half-closed or three-quarters closed. In addition, nurses have been documenting that these patients sleep more than the other 10 patients on the unit. What are the nurse manager's options for generalizing the findings?

A) There is no practical use for this research; no generalization is appropriate.
B) Findings should be generalized immediately, and in print. These are important findings.
C) The nurse can present the findings at conferences, but generalization is limited to the hospital in which the data were collected.
D) The nurse manager can obtain permission from an institutional review board to conduct a formal research study, in order to formally test hypotheses, and then generalize the findings of this second study.
E) Arrangements should be made immediately on the unit to keep all patients' doors half-closed or three-quarters closed.