Edinburgh Napier University

  This literature review is part of the Review of Nursing in the Community in Scotland. The review aims to explore the evidence base for nursing in the community in relation to the key messages within the Kerr Report (Scottish Executive (SE), 2005a) and Delivering for Health (SE, 2005b) .

The remit of the literature review was to conduct a literature search, synthesise the findings and produce a report within a three month period. This timescale has impacted on the scale of work undertaken. To fully evaluate the effectiveness of nursing interventions would have involved carrying out rigorous systematic reviews of each area of nursing in the community. Restricting the review to pooling evidence from systematic reviews would have strengthened the results, conclusions and recommendations drawn. However, systematic reviews of interventions carried out by nurses in the community are limited and this would have severely restricted the coverage of the review and utility of the conclusions.

The review design therefore incorporated methods which would allow thematic analysis and synthesis of evidence from published systematic reviews and primary research. Consequently decisions had to be made about focussing within topic areas and the rationale for this approach will be explained.