Living with a venous leg ulcer; a Descriptive study of patients' experiences.

The title is an effective title as it concisely informs us of the content of the study and makes us aware that the piece is qualitative (Cormack 1991), as it is a descriptive study of patients' experience. The author of the piece used to be a community teammanager and therefore would have success when writing this study, as she would have had a lot of experience of dealing with leg ulcers in the community. This is seen to be an important point by Cormack (1991) as it 'indicates that the quality of the published research is likely to be high' if the author has an appropriate background.

Moving on to look at the article itself the first thing we see is that there is an abstract, which according to Cormack (1991), can be of considerable value. After reading the abstract it is possible to identify the research problem, outline the methodology, give some detail of the subjects and the data collection approach and pick out principal conclusions that were made.

Danielle Cormack as Bunnie

Bartlett Cormack

Teresa Cormack

The inclusion of this evidence means that the piece of literature has started well and according to Cormack (1991) has good structure. When looking at the introduction to the study it can be seen that there is a need for this kind of research because it states that between 70000 and 90000 people are suffering from leg ulceration at any one time. However theses figures might be very different today as this piece was conducted in 1995 and there may have been a considerable change in six years. The introduction also detects a gap in the research of leg ulceration, as many studies have been completed in areas such as bandaging regimes for leg ulcers but 'less effort' has been directed towards examining the experiences and priorities of patients. This...