Heartbeat: Calling everyone who plays a role in research

July 14, 2022

OK, so Nurses, Midwives, Allied Health Professionals, Healthcare Scientists, Pharmacy staff, and Psychologists (NMAHPPS) Research Group is a bit of a mouthful, and it’s not immediately obvious what it’s all about!

To be honest, the group has considered if the name should change, but decided to stick with it. The reason for this is that it’s a term used in other organisations and it does include pretty much all our non-medical colleagues (we hope!)

What we’re trying to do is help advance our research capability as an organisation. We have some great people working here and want to build on this. We want patients to feel that our organisation is a place where research happens, that it’s a forward looking place which seeks to continually improve the care we deliver and is able to offer the most up to date technologies. We want it to be normal to be asked about research!

As a group of non-medical staff, we have focused on this staff group, but it’s important not fall into the trap of working in isolation, reinventing the wheel, or even worse, developing contradictory strategies. Our overall aim is for our organisation as a whole to become known as a place where good research happens, so we must all work together.

However, we feel there is disparity in the amount of research carried out by our different staff groups, and lots of potential to develop it further for all of them. For example, Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) make up a third of the NHS workforce with over 65,500 qualified staff and 13,500 support staff registered in 2018 (NHS Digital, 2018). However, whilst early career medics have access to clinical academic training programmes and 6% of the medical workforce is made up of clinical academic positions, this number drops to 0.1% for non-medical staff, and nonmedical professionals do play a vital role in the delivery of high quality, patient centred clinical research (2018-2020 NIHR Clinical Research Network AHP Strategy).

At an organisational level, health and social care organisations that engage in high quality and person-centred research activity have demonstrated higher rates of patient satisfaction, reduced mortality, improved CQC performance and improved organisational efficiency.

At a departmental level, a strong research culture is associated with reduced staff turnover and better translation of evidence into practice.

At an individual level, it is recognised that research activity can lead to increased perception of skills and confidence in practice and improved job satisfaction.

When you put it like that, why wouldn’t you want to maximise your research capability?!

So, what are we doing about it? As a starting point, we are currently conducting a survey as a benchmarking exercise to see where we stand at the moment. If you haven’t seen the link in the daily communications bulletin, then please have a look at the link below. The survey only takes about 10 minutes to complete and we are interested in any level of research you are doing – this could range from presenting posters at conferences right up to running clinical trials. We’re interested in it all. This survey has been designed to help us understand how any non-medical healthcare professional within SWB currently play an active role with research.

Once we have the data, we intend to use it to help developed a research strategy, to look at providing research training and research opportunities within SWB as we look to develop a more formalised approach to non-medical research within the trust. Although the survey is aimed at nonmedical colleagues, the strategy will need to be Trust strategy.

We really hope you will help us to develop this. We all want to provide the best treatment to our patients. And to do this, we need research.

To complete the survey please click here.