Overview

Guest editor:

Wai-Tong Chien PhD (KCL), MPhil, PGDip (Nurs Ed), RMN, RTN
Professor & Convener of Mental Health Research Group
School of Nursing, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China

Co-editors:
Sally Chan PhD, MSc, RMN, RTN
Professor and Head, National University of Singapore, Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Singapore

David R Thompson PhD, MBA, MA, BSc, RN, FRCN, FAAN, FESC
Professor, Cardiovascular Research Centre, Australian Catholic University Melbourne, Australia

Richard Gray PhD, MSc, BSc(Hons), Dip HE, RN, DLSHTM
Professor of Research and Director of Research Degree Programmes
Faculty of Health, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Yip Mei-Po PhD, MPhil, RN, RTN
Research Scientist, Asian Health Promotion Program
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

ISBN 978-1-921729-51-5  

The main theme of this special issue is a collection of research articles or papers on the evaluations of a wide variety of complex educational and supportive, psychosocial interventions for people with physical or mental health problems/needs such as those with heart failure, schizophrenia, depression, and cancers, as well as for their family caregivers. The papers will also report the findings of and discuss the effective strategies in evaluation of complex health care interventions, which have been conducted by mainly nurse researchers, and/or other health care professionals.

Complex interventions, consisting of multiple behavioural, technological, and organizational components, are common and important features of health care practice and research. However, they pose special evaluation problems because their components may act independently or interdependently, and it is often difficult to tease out the relationships between them. This has led to well documented difficulties in evaluating such interventions.

Discussion papers and literature or systematic reviews on recent effective strategies in complex health care interventions and major considerations for their implementation and evaluation will also be included. Therefore, the book will provide high level of scientific evidence on the care of diverse client populations and be useful reference materials to wide range of nursing and health care professionals.

Most of the articles expected to be the research reports with experimental design or randomized controlled trials for outcome evaluation of innovative psychosocial interventions; and one or two of them will be the case controlled or process-focused evaluation research. Another major section in the special issue will consist of two or three literature or systematic reviews on important complex health care interventions recently used and across cultures.