Tag: doctoral supervision

Understanding continuous education

One of the nicest things about my job is the opportunity to supervise and support doctoral students, and to then publish with them. Belatedly (as this has been available for some time), here is a paper arising from Freda Browne’s doctorate. Freda works at University College Dublin, and in her thesis used a realist approach to understand how knowledge and skill are transferred from the education context to clinical practice.

This paper, appearing in the journal Nurse Education Today, is a fine piece of work and a good example of theory-informed evaluation. Here’s the abstract:

Background: Continuing professional education (CPE) for nurses is deemed an essential component to develop, maintain and update professional skills. However, there is little empirical evidence of its effectiveness or factors which may influence its application into practice.

Objective: This paper explores a continuing professional education programme on the safe administration of medication and how new knowledge and skills are transferred into clinical practice.

Design: Realist evaluation provided the framework for this study. Realist evaluation stresses the need to evaluate programmes within “context,” and to ask what “mechanisms” are acting to produce which “outcomes.” This realist evaluation had four distinct stages. Firstly, theories were built as conjectured CMO configurations (Stage 1 and 2), then these cCMO were tested (Stage 3) and they were then refined (Stage 4).

Methods: Data was collected through document analysis and interviews (9) to build and refine CMOs. The conjectured CMOs were tested by clinical observation, interview (7), analysis of further documents and analysis of data from reported critical incidents and nursing care metric measurements.

Results: This study has shown the significant role of the ward manager in the application of new learning from the education programme to practice. Local leadership was found to enable a patient safety culture and the adoption of a quality improvement approach. The multi-disciplinary team at both organisation and local level was also found to be a significant context for the application of the education programme into practice. Reasoning skills and receptivity to change were identified to be key mechanisms which were enabled within the described contexts.

Conclusion: The findings from this study should inform policy and practice on the factors required to ensure learning from CPE is applied in practice. The realist evaluation framework should be applied when evaluating CPE programmes as the rationale for such programmes is to maintain and improve patient care.

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Early careers

A discussion unfolding at the Mental Health Nurse Academics UK meeting held on March 12th 2021 was how best to support colleagues making the transition from clinical practice into higher education. Given the very limited success within nursing in growing clinical academic careers, through which people might sustainably combine roles in practice with roles in education and/or research, this transition is a very real one. It is also, as Jan Hunter and Mark Hayter observe, relatively neglected.

The rhythms and demands of clinical practice are very different from those in universities. Most nursing, midwifery and allied health professional academics come to work in higher education without having had prior opportunities to hone their research skills through doctoral-level study. Many need to grow their skills and experiences in teaching, too, but it is on developing early career researchers that I wish to focus in this post. Along the way I draw on experiences of my own to illustrate some wider points.

I was helped to write two doctoral fellowship applications, the second after the first was unsuccessful. In this, I proposed using a set of design and methods crafted in an existing study of recovery from stroke to examine work and roles in the trajectories of people using mental health services in the community. With part-funding from a competitively secured fellowship and then employer support I was on my way. I therefore benefited from a very sensible, strategic, approach to research capacity-building which combined mentorship, help with funding applications, ongoing institutional support, and supervision. Very importantly, I was also encouraged to think programmatically, and to link my research to existing lines of enquiry with the aim of adding to a concentration of substantive, theoretical and methodological expertise.

Sharing my thesis findings through publishing was an absolute given, informed by the view that a study is not completed until it is shared. Beyond this, having concluded my PhD I both wanted, and was encouraged, to develop further the body of research commenced in my thesis. I moved swiftly from doctoral studies to a part-time post-doctoral fellowship, in which I again examined service user trajectories, work and roles but this time in the context of mental health crisis services. I was grateful for the support I received for this project from the Research Capacity Building Collaboration Wales. I also reflect, now, that our collective efforts to grow a doctorally qualified nursing, midwifery and allied health profession academic workforce have not been matched by equal efforts to enable holders of new PhDs to grow their research programmes into the post-doctoral period. It is deeply frustrating to see the holders of new doctorates devoured by teaching and related activities, their research expertise and aspirations risking extinction barely as soon as they have emerged. Mentorship to develop ongoing research plans, space for dissemination and grant-writing, and strategies for networking are so very important in the immediate post-doctoral period.

My view is also that institutional and external support for a PhD brings with it the obligation, in time, to become a PhD supervisor. Debra Jackson, Tamara Power and Kim Usher have recently published findings from a study of doctoral supervision within nursing, accurately pointing to the labour involved in this work and the degree to which it needs to be recognised by employers. Without supervision there can be no doctoral study, and without doctoral study no future research leaders.

Finally, my impressions are that, historically, research careers have tended to begin many years after initial registration and periods in practice. I would like to see more encouragement to newly registered nurses to consider research (and a career in academia) as an option, beginning with early registration for PhD study. Quite possibly this takes me back to where I started in this post, which is to observe that, despite many years of talking and trying, we haven’t yet managed to create coherent career pathways for clinical academics in nursing.