References
Health visiting research: Overcoming barriers
Abstract
Research is often perceived as something that is carried out by scientists in labs or by academics in clinical trial units, and not something that many health visitors in practice can relate to. The recent national drive to move the nursing research agenda forward may seem daunting to many health visitors, resulting in them disengaging. This article highlights why it is important for health visitors to engage with research and how research aligns with health visiting practice. It explores the common barriers to engagement at every level using the socio–ecological model and discusses the ways in which health visitors can contribute to the national agenda. It is hoped that demystifying some of the research roles will make research more accessible to health visitors in their daily practice.
In 2021, the Chief Nursing Officer for England created the first ever research strategy for nurses, ‘Making research matter’, which aims to:
The strategy's vision is to ‘create a people-centred research environment that empowers nurses to lead, participate in, and deliver research, where research is fully embedded in practice and professional decision-making, for public benefit’ (NHS England, 2021).
To achieve this, nurse research leadership development is essential and health visitors play an important role in advancing research for children and families within the community setting. Despite this, nearly 3 years later, nurses are still under-represented in research, this is especially true for health visitors.
In a recent Institute of Health Visiting (iHV) blog, Baldwin emphasised the need for more health visitors to engage and lead research (iHV, 2024a). This is because, despite nurses and health visitors making up the largest staff group in healthcare (NHS Digital, 2023), they remain under-represented in leading and undertaking research. In 2018, the Council of Deans of Health reported that the proportion of clinical academics from a nursing, midwifery and allied health professional background was less than 0.1% of the workforce (Baltruks and Callaghan, 2018). This is minute when compared to the medical workforce, where clinical academics made up around 4.6% of the workforce in the UK (Medical Schools Council, 2017).
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