The provisional programme is out and at http://www.rcn.org.uk/development/researchanddevelopment/rs/research2012/programme
Now would be a great time to book if you are after a day’s attendance
There’s not a lot of social science, not explicitly, at any rate, in this analysis of nursing, passivity and the profession’s role in propping up system dysfunctions http://nurseresearcher.rcnpublishing.co.uk/campaigns/care-campaign/interview-michael-traynor/ and only an implicit call to psychoanalytic theory, but I hope there is some insight.
The deadline to submit abstracts for the 2012 RCN Research Society Conference is Monday! Don’t miss it. The login is here: http://www.rcn.org.uk/_myrcn/onlinesubmission/register.php
Send in your abstract for the RCN 2012 international nursing research conference
Just 27 days to go before the deadline to submit your abstract on contemporary research for this event in London in April 2012. Submit by 7 November 2011.
From Dave O’Carroll: Call for papers for RCN 2012 research conference goes live on research website. The conference is taking place 23 – 25 April 2012, London, UK. Deadline for submitting abstracts is 07 November 2011. www.rcn.org.uk/research2012
Is it just me or is there something funny about nursing journals, not all of them, but some of them? Its about the number of hoops they ask you to jump through if you submit a paper. Its about the standard headings and sub-headings, the ‘implications for practice’ that you don’t dare leave out even when there aren’t any, its about being asked for certain information when its clearly not relevant. I suppose I shouldn’t bleat but it makes me think, first that there is an implicit assumption that papers submitted are a certain kind of – possibly clinical – paper, second that strict conformity of style is maybe equated with rigour of work, and third, (related to the first) there is a gradual identification with a biomedical model of research and publishing. Bibliometric work I did a while ago showed the pattern of published nursing research shifting from a single-authored, non-funded model to a multi-authored funded type of work. In one way this can be seen as nursing ‘coming of age’ as a research discipline but increasingly I wonder whether its research maturity is tending to be measured in one specific way – to the neglect of other ways of understanding the eclecticism of nursing research.
Yesterday I was sent the impact factor of the social science journal I edit, ‘health:’. We’ve gone up significantly – from 1.32 to 1.74. I know its not Nature but its pleasing. If you want to send us a paper, as long as its less than 8000 words and relevant to the journal, you can send us whatever the hell headings suit what you’ve done.
What I value most about nursing research is its eclecticism and diversity – from clinical trials looking at specific interventions to studies employing sociological concepts to investigate some aspect of the lifeworlds of families, or methodological work about developing instruments to measure attitudes of relevance to nursing. There’s also ‘critical research’ that isn’t about trying to maximise performance within a given system but develops critiques of that system and how it got to be there – this is research we need to be part of.
One phrase that trips off the tongue easily is that all our research has the intention or the potential to improve patient care but I’d like to question this. It might be that research we do primarily aims to contribute to particular fields of knowledge – for example knowledge about how government policy is developed or implemented, or the changing character of professional work with nursing as its example. I would not want to see a hierarchy between these fields of knowledge or types of research. The only hierarchy I’d like to see concerns the importance of the research question and the rigour with which its been carried out.
My least favourite research is research which is entirely parochial, that sets out to address some local change that goes on to produce some conclusions that you might have thought were available from common sense and don’t contribute to any body of knowledge. What I think of as good research doesn’t necessarily need extra time – time seems to be such a scarce commodity when we hear some of our colleagues talk. For example, I attended a methods paper on the first day where the presenter, a nurse lecturer I think, told us she was at an organ recital one evening. The recital involved some address from the organist. He talked to the audience about the principles of transcription of orchestral scores to a score for a single instrument and how both melodic and harmonic aspects of a piece need to have justice done to them in this reduction. Natalie Yates-Bolton, the presenter, thought ‘yes this is the key to understanding how to approach analysis of complex qualitative data’ she’d gathered for her PhD, data from care home residents, and from professionals, from interviews and focus groups. She didn’t think, as we can probably imagine some of our colleagues thinking, ‘I’m not at work – I refuse to expend energy on anything that might be considered paid work’. Rather her intellectual project was completely engrossing – and probably reached into her dream life.
The way to avoid the parochialism I mentioned above, to make our research important, doesn’t need big grants and big studies necessarily or more time or special clothing. Its a question of intellectual ambition, imagination and vision, for example by seeing fieldwork, local data collection as an instance of some general or theoretical phenomenon right from the start to the finish of the research.
I think that this is the kind of research that Hefce is trying to identify and reward in its research assessment when its talking about research of international significance.
Next year’s conference is going to be in London and I have the scary honour of chairing the local organising committee. The dates will almost certainly be 23-25th April, 2012 and the venue looks like it may not be the one announced at Harrogate. I will post more details as the plans emerge.
Last night I went to the Nursing Standard Nurse of the Year Awards. Its always a highly produced event, with light shows, smoke machines, loud music, a high profile presenter (Angela Rippon this year) and even massive fireworks. The purpose has always been to celebrate and publicise what’s good about nursing and individual nurses. Its Nursing Standard’s treat to the profession and particularly the winners and those shortlisted. Everyone obviously enjoys an evening of glamour and a nice meal. Strangely, this year it occurred the day after yet another blistering attack on poor quality nursing in the media. This time it was the columnist Christina Patterson on Radio 4 on Four Thought Care to be a nurse? (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b010mrzt/Four_Thought_Series_2_Care_to_be_a_nurse/). Christina who had had breast cancer and then a reoccurrence told us in unsparing detail about her two stays in hospital, both featuring cruel – that was the word she used – nurses. She ended by saying there may be any number of structural explanations for the puzzle that people go into an apparently caring profession only to behave in a far from caring way, but she pointed to a fundamental personal responsibility. Each nurse had a decision to make either to be cruel or to be kind and if they did not like the work they could leave. Her harrowing personal account came as part of what seems like a growing media genre, the (often) secretly filmed experiences of vulnerable patients in hospitals and care homes in the UK at the hands of shockingly uncaring nurses. The sense of outrage seems to make good viewing.
At Nurse of the Year, awareness of this negative publicity was everywhere. Both Peter Carter, General Secretary of the RCN and Christine Beasley, Chief Nurse for England spoke about it with concern in their addresses. So did Angela Rippon. She talked about the ‘bad apples’ in nursing, as many people do. However, I felt there was something desperate this year to blow away these disturbing images of the profession. Was the music louder than ever before? Had there ever been such enormous fireworks at the climax of the show with glitter coming down from the ceiling? One of the prize-winners was a student nurse who had blown the whistle on an attempt to cover up a major drug error. She had found the experience so distressing that she had left the profession and had only recently returned to training. However, at the end of the evening when this year’s Nurse of the Year announced that she was proud to be a nurse, the entire audience shot to its feet in a standing ovation. Angela repeated this triumphant phrase once the applause had died down a little ‘and you should be proud to be a great profession’. Obviously her intentions were good but Shakespeare’s phrase about protesting too much came to mind. My visit, while at a nursing conference in Canada a little while back, with a nurse colleague, to a menswear shop also came to mind. After a little chatting we mentioned we were both nurses. The assistant looked us both in the eye (OK I know that’s not strictly possible) and said with utmost earnestness ‘That’s nothing to be ashamed of’ which I took to mean ‘actually I find it deeply shameful, particularly for men’.
Nursing is a dangerous profession – partly I suppose because women’s behaviour is considered a legitimate topic for public discussion and, usually, disapproval. But that is another issue.
As the director of nursing who was sitting next to me remarked when we were discussing these nursing failures early in the evening, ‘I have a theory about that’. ‘Yes’, I replied, ‘so do I’.
I recently received the following email in response to a request to review a paper. I’ve removed identifying information. A suitable introduction fails me, so I will let it speak for itself:
Dear Editor
>Thank you very much for thinking of me. Indeed, i have worked in this exact area as a researcher for many years. I continue to publish on these topics and just did a keynote lecture at a conference which covered the areas of this article.
>I do a great deal of reviewing and enjoy this kind of service to my colleagues and to the enterprise of research. Because i take great care as a reviewer it takes a significant amount of time to review well–to be fair to authors. I have thus decided that i will review for journals that have published my own work. At this point, i submitted one article to [your journal] and it was rejected; the journal that is publishing that paper will now have my services as a reviewer.
I have a paper coming up that examines various issues related to xxx in xx, xxxx. My co-author will send a submission query to you and see if this is the kind of paper you’d
publish.
So let’s go from there!
>
>Yours in Health