| The focus of this study was the examination of Warren Weaver's paradigm for communication toward implementation of the communication standard of emergency nursing practice. The aim of the study was to derive implications for nursing research.;Many factors have influenced the increased use of Emergency Departments by the American public. Among these are the ability of Emergency Medical Technicians to begin life saving treatment prior to and during transport to an emergency facility, the increase in life saving technology, and the lack of health insurance by 37 million Americans. This increased utilization has impacted on the functions of emergency nurses.;The nursing profession has an ethical and legal obligation to describe reasonable nursing practice. Responsible generic and specialty nursing practice is described in published nursing standards. Examination of three editions of emergency nursing standards revealed the centrality of communication to those standards. However, there was found to be no evidence that the standard which specifically addresses communication is based upon any recognized theoretic description of communication.;The technical, semantic, and effectiveness problems of a communication system and their relationship, as proposed by Weaver, are described. The paradigm is examined for its applicability to the communication standard of emergency nursing.;If, according to Weaver, communication is the transmission of a message from A to B in order to effect desired behavior in B, and if communication is central to emergency nursing practice, and if noise is present in every transmission channel, then identification and description of sources of noise must be pursued toward developing means by which noise in the transmission channel can be kept at a tolerable level. It is proposed that research in communication for emergency nursing care, whether designed to center on frequency probability or confirmation probability or both, must center on the semantic problem toward effectiveness of communication for emergency nursing care. |
