Pearl Margaret Treacy

• PhD, MSc , BA (Hons) Soc, RGN.
• Professor Emeritus at University College Dublin

Schools are a key setting for mental health promotion and the provision of emotional support to students. As teachers and school counsellors are adults with whom adolescents have regular contact, it is likely they would be used as a help source by distressed students however there are few studies on this from an Irish context. A mixed methods desig...

Schools are a key setting for mental health promotion and the provision of emotional support to students. As teachers and school counsellors are adults with whom adolescents have regular contact, it is likely they would be used as a help source by distressed students however there are few studies on this from an Irish context. A mixed methods desig...

Abstract Introduction: Although self-harm is a relatively common occurrence in adolescents, there is a lack of understanding about the motivations behind it. A poor understanding of self-harm contributes to negative perceptions about those who self-harm and a poor healthcare experience. Aim & Methods: This study identifies motivations behind self-...

Adolescent self-harm is recognized as a serious public health problem; however, there is little reliable comparative data on its prevalence or characteristics, or on the extent of help-seeking for self-harm. The aims of the present study were to determine the prevalence and associated factors of adolescent self-harm in an urban region in Ireland, a...

Partnering in research across disciplines and across countries can be challenging due to differing contexts of practice and culture. This study sought to demonstrate how central constructs that have application across disciplines and countries can be studied while concurrently considering context. Groups of nurses from Botswana, Ireland, Israel, Ne...

Aims and objectivesTo identify the reported predictors of the practice of restricting a child for a clinical procedure in hospital.Background Previous work in this area is dominated by discussion papers and suggestions for addressing the issue of restriction. This is the first study to explore reported predictors of this practice with a view to imp...

Restricting a child for a clinical procedure has been linked to negative physical and psychological sequelae. The practice of restriction remains an implicit and unquestioned aspect of care for children during a clinical procedure. In this study we aimed to describe the practice of restricting a child’s movement for a clinical procedure by conducti...

The aim of this paper is to inform the development of social work practice and policy by applying a practice-based evidence perspective to the experiential knowledge of social workers responsible for managing cases of elder abuse in Ireland. The study adopted a qualitative descriptive research design. Semi-structured interview data were collected f...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the support experiences of older people who have been abused in Ireland. Design/methodology/approach – Recruited through dedicated elder abuse services, nine older people who had experienced elder abuse participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The data were analysed using thematic cont...

Unlabelled: Falls in the older population are associated with increased morbidity and mortality especially in the absence of risk reduction measures. The study aims were to compare the characteristics of older people who present to the Emergency Department (ED) following a fall with the general older ED population and examine referral patterns fol...

Psychiatric patients are liable to stereotyping by healthcare providers. We explored attitudes toward caring for psychiatric patients among 13 nurses working in general hospitals in Ireland. Participants thought aloud in response to a simulated patient case and described a critical incident of a patient for whom they had cared. Two attitudinal orie...

Public discourses concerning older people are available in a variety of texts, including popular media, and these discourses position older people with particular age identities. This study examined discursive formations of ageing and age identities in print media in Ireland. Constituting a single media event, newspaper texts concerned with revised...

To measure the 12-month prevalence of elder abuse and neglect in community-dwelling older people in Ireland and examine the risk profile of people who experienced mistreatment and that of the perpetrators. Cross-sectional general population survey. Community. People aged 65 years or older living in the community. Information was collected in face-t...

  This paper is a report of a study of older emergency department attendees' demographic, health and social profiles.   Relative to the general population, older people are higher users of hospital emergency departments. Attendance is most often associated with medical need, including a chronic condition and related morbidities.   A series of stand...

Prescriptive authority for nurses and midwives was introduced in Ireland in 2007. This allows nurses and midwives who have completed a prescribing preparation programme to independently prescribe a wide-range of medications. To date little is known of patient outcomes such as satisfaction with the consultation process and intention to comply as a c...

To describe Irish nurses' views of clinical leadership and to describe their clinical leadership development needs. Nurses are often unclear about the precise nature of clinical leadership and its impact on the processes and outcomes of care and little is known about their self-perceived clinical leadership development needs. Seventeen focus group...

To describe self-reported barriers to clinical leadership development among nurses and midwives in Ireland. Effective clinical leadership is essential for optimising care and improving patient outcomes. Clinical leadership development is concerned with intrapersonal and interpersonal capabilities and is context bound. Barriers to clinical leadershi...

Continued ambiguity about the scope of mental health nursing is harmful to the discipline's identity and to patients' interests. Using a Delphi survey design, consensus was achieved on a set of 70 items representing core elements of mental health nursing among a sample of 150 mental health nurses working in Ireland. Items achieving consensus in Rou...

Patients aged 65 years or older account for a growing proportion of emergency department (ED) repeat attendances. This study aimed to identify health and non-health factors associated with repeat ED attendance, defined as one or more visits in the previous 6 months in patients aged 65 years or older, and to examine the interaction between social an...

To develop an integrated cognitive and social understanding of assessment in mental health nursing. Assessment is a vital component of nursing care for mental health service users, largely driven by a tacit, experiential model of assessment; this approach is at variance with an evidence-based approach to assessment. A qualitative design was employe...

Objective: To compare the characteristics of older people presenting to the emergency department (ED) and admitted to hospital with those discharged directly from the ED and identify factors independently associated with hospital admission. Design: This is a cross-sectional survey of 306 community dwelling people aged 65 years or older presentin...

This paper is a report of a study identifying psychosocial interventions relevant to routine care and exploring their content critically and analysing patterns in the use of these interventions. People experiencing enduring and serious mental disorders value psychosocial engagement as a means of achieving recovery and rehabilitation. However, menta...

To test the validity and reliability of the newly developed Irish Nursing Minimum Data Set for mental health (I-NMDS (MH)) to ensure its clinical usability. Internationally, difficulties exist in defining the contribution mental health nursing makes to patient care. Structured information systems, like the Nursing Minimum Data Set, have been develo...

Aim. The aim of the study was to identify the social support networks of older people living in the community in Ireland using Wenger’s (1994) network typology. Background. The population of older people in the community is increasing. With increasing age and changes in family circumstances a substantial proportion of older people will require soci...

This paper reports a study of the risk factors for social and emotional loneliness among older people in Ireland. Using the ‘Social and Emotional Scale for Adults’, the social and emotional dimensions of loneliness were measured. Emotional loneliness was conceptualised as having elements of both family loneliness and romantic loneliness. The data w...

In a study to establish the interrater reliability of the Irish Nursing Minimum Data Set (I-NMDS) for mental health difficulties relating to the choice of reliability test statistic were encountered. The objective of this paper is to highlight the difficulties associated with testing interrater reliability for an ordinal scale using a relatively ho...

to identify research priorities for midwifery in Ireland in the short, medium and long term. a three-round Delphi survey design was used to identify midwifery research topics. Issues identified through content analysis formed Questionnaires 2 and 3. Participants rated the importance of each topic (1=low importance to 7=high importance), and a mean...

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to identify and rate clinical, managerial, and educational nursing research priorities in Ireland. Design: The study design was a three-round, decision Delphi survey to identify and rate the importance of clinical, managerial, and educational research issues. A discussion group workshop was also undertaken t...

One theme of academic discourse and research in mental health nursing is the exploration and application of psychosocial models of nursing practice. Despite this, the influence of disciplinary psychological knowledge on practitioners' talk about nursing practice has not been extensively researched. To address this gap, the authors analyzed talk abo...

This paper reports a literature review that aimed to analyse the way in which nursing intensity and patient dependency have been considered to be conceptually similar to nursing workload, and to propose a model to show how these concepts actually differ in both theoretical and practical terms. The literature on nursing workload considers the concep...

Despite efforts to prevent the onset of smoking, the rate among older children remains high. In this article, the authors report on a longitudinal, qualitative study of 11 to 16-year-old children describing children's construction of what it means to be a smoker, the reasons given for children smoking, and their views of smoking behavior. Findings...

The aim of this study was to identify patient problems, nursing interventions and nursing outcomes to be included in a nursing minimum data set for Ireland. In 2002, a research programme funded by the Irish Health Research Board, was established to develop and test a nursing minimum data set to capture the nursing contribution to patient care in Ir...

Medicine is recognised as a dominant source of governmentality and social regulation, and although nursing has been implicated in the same process, analytical work in this area has been sparse. The article aims to present an analysis of nursing records in order to understand the structural and social processes that mediate the texts. 45 sets of nur...

It is commonly acknowledged that nursing care is underrepresented in the healthcare record. The nursing minimum data set (NMDS) has been proposed as a method of routinely collecting information on core aspects of the nursing contribution to care, organised primarily in terms of phenomena, interventions and outcomes. Potential applications in clinic...

One of the challenges in health care in Ireland is the relatively slow acceptance of standardised clinical information systems. Yet the national Irish health reform programme indicates that an Electronic Health Care Record (EHCR) will be implemented on a phased basis. [3-5]. While nursing has a key role in ensuring the quality and comparability of...

This paper reports a study analysing the various functions of nurses' documentation of patient assessments. Modes of documentation have received much attention in the nursing press since the integration of the nursing process and nursing models. Previous research has shown that current documentation practices do not consistently promote effective c...

Previous research has indicated that young people are under considerable social pressure to take up smoking. This study has therefore sought to explore and better understand the mechanisms through which peer-related social factors operate to encourage young people to smoke. Individual qualitative interviews were held with adolescent children aged 1...

Modes of rationality in nursing documentation: biology, biography, and the ‘voice of nursing’ This article is based on a discourse analysis of the complete nursing records of 45 patients, and concerns the modes of rationality that mediated text-based accounts relating to patient care that nurses recorded. The analysis draws on the work of the criti...

Health behaviour and attitudes among young people can be interpreted within the context of personal and social identity. This paper explores ways in which 10- to 11-year-olds in Northern Ireland expressed perceptions of gender ideology while discussing the topic of smoking. The data were gathered by means of in-depth interviews (n=85). Although few...

This article concerns the meanings that a sample of nurse teachers ascribed to the concepts of reflection and reflective practice as aspects of an undergraduate nursing curriculum. It represents one of the major findings in a qualitative study that set out to explore nurse teachers' perceptions and experiences of using reflection with diploma nursi...

This article presents a conceptualization of nursing as it is presently being constructed in Ireland. Official discourses on nursing are explored and the ways in which these discourses have been further shaped through consultation is highlighted. This is further supported by reference to research examining practicing nurses' discourses. There is so...

Abstract This paper presents qualitative data from Irish children and adolescents on their experiences in relation to alcohol consumption. A sample of 78 participants (average age 11.5 years) was selected. A proportion of this initial sample were interviewed at intervals over a period of 3 years. The participants’ consumption patterns were analyzed...

Tobacco addiction represents a major public health problem, and most addicted smokers take up the habit during adolescence. We need to know why. With the aim of gaining a better understanding of the meanings smoking and tobacco addiction hold for young people, 85 focused interviews were conducted with adolescent children from economically deprived...

Health promotion, with its concern with empowerment and autonomy, must recognize the agency of its target population. Based on 85 in-depth interviews with 10- to 11-year-old children throughout Northern Ireland, this paper argues that it is necessary to focus on the social relations of children if we are to understand and prevent childhood smoking....

This paper presents data from Irish children on their perceptions and experi ences in relation to illicit drugs as they approached adolescence. Depth inter views were conducted with 78 participants and data were analysed using a qualitative strategy whereby data were categorised into conceptual themes. Findings suggested that most participants had...