NURS 8740 Week 6 Tables and Figure Set Example

Three Displays That Carry the Mobilization Results: A Table, a Figure and an Event Table, Each Titled With the Point It Makes

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 8740: Doctoral Seminar IV

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Three Displays That Carry the Mobilization Results: A Table, a Figure and an Event Table, Each Titled With the Point It Makes

How the Displays Were Chosen

The results of the nurse-led mobilization project could fill a dozen tables. Three displays carry them here, chosen by asking which findings a reader most needs to see rather than read. The first shows the main result split by day type, because the difference between weekdays and weekends is the finding most likely to be lost in prose. The second shows how quickly the night screen became routine, a pattern over time that suits a figure. The third lists every stopped session, because a reader judging safety should see each event rather than a rate. Each display is titled with a statement rather than a label, follows APA style for numbering, titles and notes (American Psychological Association, 2020) and is written to be understood without the surrounding text.

Four conventions apply to all three. Percentages are given to one decimal place and always beside the count and base they come from. Abbreviations are expanded in the note under the display where they first appear. The source of every number is named in the note. And the same quantity never appears in two displays with different values; the 75 sitting-up days in Table 1 are the same 75 days that the weekly points in the run chart add up to.

Table 1

Table 1 carries the main result. The title states the claim, and the columns are arranged so that the comparison a reader wants, protocol against baseline within each day type, sits side by side.

Table 1

Sitting-Up Days Doubled on Weekdays but Did Not Change on Weekends

Note. Baseline = January 5 to February 1; protocol = February 2 to March 28. IMS = ICU Mobility Scale (Hodgson et al., 2014); level 3 = seated on the side of the mattress, feet down, holding the position without being propped. NA = not applicable, because safety screens were not part of practice before the protocol. Percentages in the last row use passed screens as the base; all other percentages use qualifying ventilator days. Source: flowsheet report ICU Mobility Weekly, cleaned as described in the data cleaning memo.

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the first process measure week by week. A figure suits it better than a table because the point is the shape: a low first week, then a quick climb and a plateau.

Figure 1

Night Safety Screens Were Recorded on at Least Four Days in Five From the Third Protocol Week

Note. Each point is the number of qualifying ventilator days with a safety screen result recorded in the flowsheet by 0600, divided by all qualifying days that week (weekly counts: 14 of 22, 20 of 25, 20 of 24, 20 of 23, 19 of 21, 22 of 24, 20 of 22 and 23 of 25; total 158 of 186). No baseline is shown because the screen did not exist before February 2. Source: flowsheet report ICU Mobility Weekly.

Table 2

Table 2 lists every session that stopped. A rate of 7.4 per 100 sessions is reported in the results, but a reader judging whether nurse-led mobilization was safe needs to see what each event was, at what point it happened and how the patient recovered.

Table 2

No Stopped Session Went Past the Edge-of-Bed Position, and All Six Patients Recovered Within 15 Minutes

Note. SpO2 = peripheral oxygen saturation; MAP = mean arterial pressure; RASS = Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale. Thresholds are those in the protocol's stopping rules. Level 1 = sitting in bed; level 3 = sitting over the edge of the bed. Across all 81 sessions there were no falls, and no breathing tube, central or arterial catheter, or surgical drain came out. Source: event forms checked against nursing notes.

Checks Made Before the Displays Were Final

Three checks were run on the set. First, every number that appears in more than one place was traced to the same source cell: the 158 screens in Figure 1's note equal the 121 weekday and 37 weekend screens in Table 1, and the 81 sessions in Table 2's note equal the 70 weekday and 11 weekend attempts in Table 1. Second, each display was shown without its surrounding text to the night champion, who had not seen the drafts, and she was asked to state the main point of each. She stated all three correctly and asked what level 3 meant on the first draft of Table 2, which is why the note now defines levels 1 and 3. Third, the display titles were read aloud in sequence to confirm that, taken alone, they summarize the results: weekday mobilization doubled while weekends did not change, night screens became routine within three weeks and the sessions that stopped did so early and recovered quickly.

One display was dropped during this process. A bar chart of patient characteristics duplicated Table 1 of the descriptive section and made no argument, so it was removed. Good graphic practice in medical research favors fewer displays that each answer a specific question over many that restate the same data (Duke et al., 2015), and three is enough for this results section.

References

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

Duke, S. P., Bancken, F., Crowe, B., Soukup, M., Botsis, T., & Sridhara, R. (2015). Seeing is believing: Good graphic design principles for medical research. Statistics in Medicine, 34(22), 3040-3059. https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.6549

Hodgson, C., Needham, D., Haines, K., Bailey, M., Ward, A., Harrold, M., Young, P., Zanni, J., Buhr, H., Higgins, A., Presneill, J., & Berney, S. (2014). Feasibility and inter-rater reliability of the ICU Mobility Scale. Heart & Lung, 43(1), 19-24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrtlng.2013.11.003