Research Questions Research questions need to be specific so …show more content…
Since my participants are the cardiac surgical patients on the cardiothoracic surgery stepdown units, there will be limited sample size. Cardiothoracic surgery stepdown units hold a mixture of cardiac surgeries and thoracic surgeries, which limits my participants. The cardiothoracic surgery stepdown units could possible house “off-service” patients if there are no other beds available in the hospital and our patient population census is low. In Pröpper, van Valen, van Domburg, Brunott, and Bogers’ (2015) study, “the number of patients enrolled was limited, and this made it more difficult to generalize the findings of this study to the overall population of cardiothoracic surgery patients” (p. 536). I plan to address this variable by involving all of the cardiothoracic surgery patients within Duke University Hospital and choosing the time of the study to be at the beginning of the year. The beginning of the year is when the cardiothoracic surgeries are generally higher, due to the surgeries slowing down around the