Literature Review

Assessment 2 instructions
Presentation of Literature Review
The assessment asked for a summary of your findings from the literature to date.
The paper is to summarise your initial findings, background and significance from your literature review.
Explain the context for your review (that is, your proposed topic and can be drawn from assessment one), and then discuss what is currently known or accepted in this area.
• How many articles did you find?
• What was you inclusion and exclusion criteria
• How many articles were retained for the review
• Highlights of the key findings from your reading to date
You may like to use a PRISMA table for some of this content.
Target your paper to colleagues in your workplace – that is, educated professionals with some familiarity to the discipline topic but who may not be aware of the current knowledge or practice in your topic area.

This paper will focus on the foundation of a clinical project titled “Oral Hygiene in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU): What could nurses do to improve practice?” and will highlight the project plan and search strategy used to find relevant literatures for the execution of the project. According to Jarrett (2018) a project plan is a vital component in the preparation stage of a project that defines the project objectives, approach in achievement of the objectives, shareholders involved, cost, schedule, and the expected outcomes A search strategy defines the approaches used in the sourcing of the necessary information and the possible sources of information that will be utilise throughout the project (Jarrett, 2018).
In the ICUs, the absence of standardized oral assessment tools in combination with provision of best practice oral hygiene to patients who are uncooperative, delirious or are mechanically ventilated can be challenging as well as controversial. Harmon and Grech (2020) found that while nurses are tasked with promoting oral hygiene in the ICUs, patients still suffer from oral illnesses related to bacteria in their mouth and pharynx. The authors also explained that these bacteria could further translocate to the lungs thus causing pneumonia such as Ventilator Associated Pneumonia (VAP). Although nurses are trained to care for patients in the ICUs, there are other underlying factors that impact their productivity. For example, Berry et al. (2011) and Davidson et al. (2011) both explained some of the barriers that might affect the prioritisation of optimum oral hygiene. These included the severity of the conditions of the patients, the presence of endotracheal tubes or masks, facility policies and the procedural interventions performed by other health professionals in the facility. Therefore, in the attainment of nurses’ objectives, the above discussed factors need to be handled and solved to develop best practices for nurses while promoting oral hygiene in ICU.
The attainment of the project’s objectives will require an intensive analysis and review of literature to identify the already known, recommended, and studied practices to identify the best practice.
The identification of beneficial literature for review will be guided by the use of the following key words:
Intensive Care Unit, ICU, oral hygiene, nursing, oral care, colonization, oral assessment tools, intubated, mechanically ventilated, critically ill patients, critical care, mouth care, ventilator-associated pneumonia, VAP.
By using the keywords listed above in a literature search, the researcher will be able to identify important sources from the wide pool of data. Furthermore, in order to insist of the key words and phrases as compulsory elements in the search, the researcher will use quotation marks around them. Moreover, the researcher understands that some words in the search need to accompany others or substitute others in the search and will therefore use Boolean operators such as “OR”and “AND” (Leung et al., 2019). Additionally, the researcher will use the Boolean operator “NOT” to exclude some items from the search (Leung et al., 2019). The inclusion criteria for the literature review search strategy would be all English language literatures or translations of literatures into the English language. It will also include a wide range of studies, articles and peer-reviews investigating oral hygiene guidelines and practices in all adult ICUs published since 2010. This is to ensure that comprehensive representation of knowledge and practices are current and up to date with strong evidence-based support. All studies on paediatric patients in ICUs will be excluded in the literature review.
Based on the reputation of some databases to provide reliable information, the following databases will be prioritized in the search.
Google Scholar: This database is a product by Google that has all scholarly research literature that had been uploaded to the internet (Google, 2020). The freely accessible database is considered by many researchers as the easiest route to access books, journals, patents, and websites for research (Halevi et al., 2017).
The Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL): This universally utilised database contains full-text article journals on nursing (EBSCOHost, 2020). According to Hopia and Heikkilä (2019) this database is essential in nursing and has basic and advanced search categories and is also be a great companion since it will limit the searches to nursing avoiding the confusion caused by homonyms
PubMed: This database is a free search engine database accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts and contains peer- reviewed literatures with more than 30 million citations (National Library of Medicine, 2019). The National Library of Medicine (2019) explained that although PubMed does not include full-text journal articles, links are available to access the full text through other sources, such as the publisher’s website or PubMed Central.
The Cochrane Library: This is a leading globally recognized data base resource and is free to access by university students and health professionals through institute affiliation registration. It is a collection of high-quality databases, which included the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews which is crucial for evidence-based researches and practices to improve health care (Cochrane Library, n.d).
The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI): This is an international research and development organization based in the Australia (Joanna Briggs Institute, n.d). It is used globally by health professionals and the institute objective is to improve health care by supporting and providing
high quality reliable information and resources (Joanna Briggs Institute, n.d). Additionally, it contains evidence-based practice resources, systematic reviews and educational programs that are practical and effective (Joanna Briggs Institute, n.d).

For the literature review, the following journals will be prioritized as the best sources of information.
Intensive and Critical Care Nursing: This journal provides a vast pool of articles on nursing for the critically ill and those in ICU. The journal also provides an ideal platform for comparative studies as it had as on 10th March, 2020 released 56 volumes (ScienceDirect, 2020).
Australian Critical Care: This journal is the official journal of the Australian College of Critical Care Nurses (ACCCN). The journal will be essential as it provides information on nursing in ICU with a scope narrowing down to the Australian Context. Consequently, the journal will enable the researcher settle for practices that are practical in Australia (ACCCN, 2020).
In conclusion, through the project plan and search strategy discussed above, the researcher will access adequate information that will be used to investigate and solve the existing gap in oral hygiene practices in the ICU. As part of the search strategy, the researcher has developed a list of databases and journals that will be prioritised in sourcing relevant information and are essential in reviewing literatures for the purpose of fulfilment of the project objectives.  
References
ACCCN. (2020). Aims & scope – Australian Critical Care. ScienceDirect. Retrieved from
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/australian-critical-care/about/aims-and-scope
Berry, A., Davidson, P., Masters, J., Rolls, K., & Ollerton, R. (2011). Effects of three approaches to standardized oral hygiene to reduce bacterial colonization and ventilator associated pneumonia in mechanically ventilated patients: A randomised control trial. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 48(6), 681-688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2010.11.004
Cochrane Library (n.d.). Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Retrieved from
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/about-cdsr
Davidson, P. M., Nicholson, L., Pasqualotto, C., Rolls, K., & Berry, A. M. (2011).
Consensus based clinical guideline for oral hygiene in the critically ill. Intensive and
Critical Care Nursing, 27(4), 180-185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iccn.2011.04.005
EBSCOHost. (2020). CINAHL complete. EBSCO Information Services. Retrieved from https://www.ebscohost.com/nursing/products/cinahl-databases/cinahl-complete
Google. (2020). Google Scholar. Retrieved from https://scholar.google.com/
Halevi, G., Moed, H., & Bar-Ilan, J. (2017). Suitability of Google Scholar as a source of scientific information and as a source of data for scientific evaluation—Review of the literature. Journal of Informetrics, 11(3), 823-834. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.06.005
Harmon, J., & Grech, C. (2020). Technical and contextual barriers to oral care: New insights from intensive care unit nurses and health care professionals. Australian Critical Care, 33(1), 62-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aucc.2019.06.001
Hopia, H., & Heikkilä, J. (2019). Nursing research priorities based on CINAHL database: A scoping review. Nursing Open, 7(2), 483-494. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.428
Jarrett, P. (2018). How to do your research project: A guide for students. Emergency Nurse, 25(10), 16-16. https://doi.org/10.7748/en.25.10.16.s19
Joanna Briggs Institute (n.d.). JBI Approach to evidence-based health care. Retrieved from
https://joannabriggs.org/jbi-approach.html
Leung, B. T., Xie, J., Geng, L., & Pun, P. N. (2019). Information search
strategies. Transferring Information Literacy Practices, 11-
14. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7743-3_2
National Library of Medicine (2019). Pubmed Overview. Retrieved from
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pubmed.html
NursingCentre. (2020b). Journals & articles. Lippincott NursingCenter. Retrieved from
https://www.nursingcenter.com/journals-articles
ScienceDirect. (2020). Intensive and critical care nursing. ScienceDirect.com.
Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/intensive-and-critical-care- nursing