QI showcase: Creating a research ready workforce

My name is Lauren.  
I'm in the research team at CCS and I did an exploration of how we can build a research ready workforce in our trust.  

A little bit briefly about the background about why we did it.  
Research is the single most important way to improve healthcare, and we know that research leads to better outcomes for patients and also benefits for staff and the NHS long term plan outlines a vision for a research positive culture, where all staff feel empowered and supported to take part in clinical research delivery as part of their normal job. We can see this in recent research strategies, particularly for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals.  
And research is a big part of the trust and our quality strategy, and what we do as part of the research team.  But we do know that there are barriers for staff getting involved in research and different perceptions from staff about how to get involved in research and what it actually involves.  

So we looked to do exploration of staff and views on research to hopefully inform initiatives and improvements and for research engagement at the trust.  

It was an early stage improvement project - doing the initial research to find out what the opportunity or the problem is and understanding this to then inform or design and plans for improvements and hopefully to be able to implement these. 

So first of all, I collected data with a trust wide survey that was sent out, making it possible to collect views from staff about their research experience, barriers and enablers and included a measure of research and development culture which indicates the strength of the organisation's research and development culture. 

So across different measures of research to all - skills and intention to split this down by professional group and services as well to look at this in more detail. 

And so, for example, you could see that dynamic health services had quite a high research and development culture index in the trust as well as allied health professionals and nursing out of all of the professional groups. 

And then this informed more in depth interviews to find out a little bit more from staff and with this smaller group that got lots of really in depth information and could pull out themes.

Some of the findings  -  we found that lots of staff have been involved in service evaluations or local audit type projects and / or had an active involvement in research delivery – so  data collection for already established projects. 

But there was an indication from staff that they'd be interested in completing their own research. Either developing it for a research qualification or being an author of a research publication, or leading their own research so staff are interested in developing their own research ideas and projects. 

And we found that there's a positive attitude to research across the trust in general. 

 
So some of the themes of the barriers that were coming out and from the interviews were feeling like perhaps they're not the right person to take part in research or it's not part of their job or requirements. And obviously clinical demands mean that it's really hard to get protected time sometimes. If their managers don't value research to enable this and protected time, or sometimes within the team there is a lack of recognition or understanding about what research is or what it involves. 

But there are also enablers - there was really positive feedback about the Trust Quality Improvement (QI) Academy and support from the library service and research team and staff and a view that they could get involved in research if it was either seen as a protected role or seen as part of their protected time within their professional role. 

So if managers were able to protect the time to take part in research, or if staff had a personal interest in taking part for either and career development, or if they have had a specific research project that they wanted to take part or find out more about within their teams or if it's a strategy within their team as well. And that was seen as really enabling us to take part.

There was lots that came out of the research. But I guess the main points were what we could pull out of the themes as action points to consider or suggestions from staff of how to improve research engagement. 

Some of these were sort raising awareness of what support the research team can provide and more research skills, training and linking with the library service and also to the quality improvement skills development because we know that there is quite a big crossover between research and quality improvement and having a research newsletter so people can access research news more easily and building links with universities and academics and ensuring that there is resource for staff to discuss and develop  
their own projects and ideas was highlighted as really, really important.  

Some of these ideas and others might need a bit more input on a trust level, including developing the SystmOne database to be able to enhance data use for research. I thought that this would be really useful because there's lots of data within services that they could use for research purposes and external communications to raise the profile of the trust and research. 

And having a research element within job descriptions can help protect time and have more of a dedicated research or clinical academic role.

And lastly, holding research showcases and events, similar to this Quality Improvement Showcase  - they've been really successful so maybe a similar thing for research or linking in and having representation from leadership, that shows it’s valued and would be really beneficial. 

Hopefully we're going to take lots of these action points forward in an improvement plan to hopefully improve engagement and research at the trust.  
 
Thank you.