Professing nursing research: the Italian experience.

Abstract

The need for, and value of, nursing should be obvious to all, both locally and globally, in extreme situations and in relation to the everyday. At the time of writing, the media is reporting on the catastrophic consequences of Ebola and on the positive contribution of nurses and doctors. The everyday care activities of local care-workers may receive less media attention but are no less important. The need for, and value of, nursing research should be as obvious too. In some countries, nursing research is well developed and acknowledged as a legitimate and necessary basis for nursing activities. In other places, positivist paradigms prevail and nurse researchers encounter resistance, scepticism and misunderstanding in relation to qualitative research and philosophical scholarship in particular. Italian nurse researchers seem a case in point. This collaborative editorial was inspired by conversations with Italian colleagues regarding the position of nurses and nursing research. Just this year, the first full professor of nursing in Italy was appointed in Rome. The first PhD programme for Italian nurses produced its first graduates only in 2010. Three lessons might be extracted from the Italian experience: nurse researchers require patience and tenacity to convey the meaning and value of qualitative research; research ethics committees as they are currently composed in most cases still do not appear to be ready to value the contribution of qualitative research; and engagement with researchers in the international research community is beneficial to all. One Italian experience we discussed was the ethical review process relating to a qualitative study on the theme of children’s experience of chronic disease. The research ethics committee members were sceptical of the scientific merit of the study. They questioned the relatively small number of research participants and the value of qualitative research. After four revisions in response to committee members’ comments, the study was eventually approved with one member declaring that this would ‘open up new horizons’. The tenacity and patience of the research team paid off, and, in the end, at least some resistance was overcome. Progress, it seems, was made in terms of an understanding of the value and potential of qualitative nursing research to explain parts of patients’ illness trajectory as well as of their family members that other research paradigms cannot reach. To overcome some of the challenges of negotiating the ethical review process, we agreed that research ethics committees require members with qualitative research expertise. A professor of nursing would be an ideal person for this role with the opportunity for mutual learning and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Regarding what a professor of nursing would profess in such a committee, we agreed that this would include the following: the value of research examining patient, family and practitioners’ experiences; the importance of research interventions that respect dignity and improve the quality of life of care-recipients and care-givers;