Critical Appraisal Authorship - Nursing Assignment Help

Assignemnt Task :

Introduction
There is a scarcity of research on the bacterial contamination of mobile phones of health care workers worldwide (Kent, Marsh, May & XI, 2020, p.5). This paper will critically appraise one of the few primary research studies on this subject (Tailor, Nikita, Naiker, Naivalu, & Kumar, 2019) using a set of questions to identify the strengths and weakness of key sections of the study, namely: authorship, research question, research design, research methods and lastly limitations and results. In addition, an outline enablers and barriers to the adoption of the study recommendations or findings in relation to a given scenario and clinical question.

PART A – Critical appraisal
Authorship
White (2018) maintains that an appraisal of research literature should include an appraisal of the quality of authorship, which may include, “cited credentials, affiliations and known expertise in the health discipline on the research topic” (p.12). The authorship of the study being appraised in this paper (Tailor et al, 2019), comprised four authors who had a Bachelor of medical laboratory science, and one who was a qualified dentist, affiliated with universities. It can therefore be concluded that the authorship was a strength of this study, given cited credentials, qualifications and affiliations. However, a weakness of this study was the omission of a disclosure statement in the study, indicating that there was no ‘conflict of interest’. A conflict of interest is described by White (2018, p. 6) as a situation when there are commercial, legal, financial, or any other opposing interests that may affect the study. 
 
Research question & Justification
This study (Tailor et al., 2019) sought to identify the “colonisation of microorganisms and the variety of bacteria present” on the mobile phones of students at a university in Fiji (p. 106). The justification for the research – found in the ‘introduction’ – was a weakness of this paper, as discussion was supported by only eight studies, and these were studies published from 2009 to 2014, rather than close to the date of the study’s publication of 2019. However, the authors did
note three key points in this section, being: mobile phones are used by health care workers(HCW) in clinical settings; studies have reported that HCWs frequently touch their mobile phones, and seldom clean them; and argued that their study was filling a gap in the literature, on how contaminated these devices can be. Thus, the discussion within the introduction section was a strength of this study, as it was well structured, and demonstrated several solid arguments to support the undertaking of this study.