Implementing a clinical academic career pathway in nursing: criteria for success and challenges ahead

Abstract

The UK Clinical Research Collaboration’s (UKCRC) proposals for new arrangements aimed at making it easier—or possible—for nurses and midwives to combine research and clinical careers have raised levels of excitement within the profession. On a good day, it feels like nursing and midwiferya are steadily becoming more research savvy, both in terms of the research-mindedness of those delivering and managing care and a growing capacity to get research grants, do useful research and supervise research students. And these proposals are part of the good news in that regard. On a not so good day, these initiatives feel piecemeal, hard to make sustainable and only going a very small way to realise the potential of research within and around nursing activity. There have been other capacity-building schemes. In the late 1960s, the English Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) proposed and funded the ‘Study of Nursing Care’ programme of research, which produced seminal works and started the research careers of a number of individuals who became some of the profession’s first research leaders such as Jean McFarlane, the first Professor of Nursing in England. Further DHSS fellowships were awarded in subsequent decades also giving a significant boost to another wave of future research leaders. More recently, we have seen the Health Foundation Fellowship and Partnership schemes, which have funded the research (and leadership training) of around 30 young researchers, and a funding alliance between the English Department of Health and the Higher Education Funding Council for England aimed at developing research capacity in nursing and the Allied Health Professions. In Scotland, the predecessor bodies to the Scottish Funding Council continually invested in research in these professions and benefits have been identified in a number of scoping exercises such as that described by Alison Tierney summarised at http://www.sehd.scot.nhs.uk/cso/Publications/rm35/rm35-00.htm. The present UKCRC proposal, like the Scottish approach, has featured arrangements to enable and encourage the forming of links between universities and the Journal of Research in Nursing ©2008 SAGE PUBLICATIONS Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore VOL 00 (00) 1–3 DOI: 10.1177/ 1744987108101952