Clinical Setting Nursing Research
Nurse Researcher,Responsibilities of Nursing Researchers,Skill Needed For a Nursing Researcher
Nurse Researcher
nurses who have research as one of their responsibilities or their sole
responsibility and are at least partly supported by salary from a clinical
setting, inclusive of hospitals, clinics, and other agencies providing health
care to patients.
Such nurses are usually prepared at the doctoral level but
sometimes at the master’s level. The additional responsibilities of these
individuals may include education, quality improvement, evaluation in the
clinical facility, and the requisite administration accompanying those duties.
The position in the clinical setting can be either line or staff. The
individual also may be jointly appointed to a school or college of nursing or
another health-related institution for a percentage of their time.
Responsibilities of Nursing Researchers
The specific responsibilities for these individuals include
conducting research and assisting others in conducting, applying, and utilizing
research. Although those are the explicit role responsibilities, the nurse
researcher in a clinical setting is expected to affect the nursing staff
positively in several indirect ways.
The nurse researcher is an educator,
teaching about the research process, guiding critiques of completed research
for application and utilization, and developing research days for sharing of
research. The researcher is involved in the professional development of staff,
facilitating staff to present and publish their databased projects under the
tutelage of the researcher.
Nurse researchers in clinical agencies usually have
the responsibility to represent the agency without side researchers using the
agency as a data collection site. In the role of change agent, the researcher
helps to make practice research based.
The change agent role and the researcher
role are often combined with the quality control role, where pre and
post-monitoring or longitudinal monitoring around a change are needed.
Skill Needed For a Nursing Researcher
To carry out these responsibilities, the researcher must possess
several attributes. Knowledge and skills in the research are the most obvious,
but equally important are people skills (eg, motivating, confirming, guiding
professional development) and conceptual skills.
The latter set of skills comes
into play in several ways, for example, identifying a researchable problem and
reworking complaints and questions into a basis for finding solutions.
Differences In Academic and Clinical Research
A major difference between the academic researcher and the nurse
researcher in the clinical setting is the mission of the employer. The
university has a societal responsibility for knowledge advancement.
The health
care institution has a responsibility for health care. Mission is a key work
environment characteristic , and the work environment has a pro found impact on
the outcomes of one’s work. This is especially true for nurse researchers in
clinical settings, whose outcomes are influenced by their environment.
Within
clinical agencies the following have been associated with research
productivity:
(a) research culture (policies and procedures indicative of a
consistent commitment to nursing research, such as the presence of research in
the agency’s mission).
(b) resources for research activities (eg, library
holdings, funding of research activities, presence of other nurses with
advanced nursing education).
(c) attitudes (eg, belief that the public and
other professional colleagues value nursing research.
(d) esprit, a
positive group work morale. Clearly, these nurse researcher roles are complex
and not an insignificant addition to any staff.
One of the first tasks for the nurse researcher new to a setting is
to assess the work environment, including the resources available. In
particular, the nurse researcher cannot function well if isolated from others
with research skills.
Baccalaureate graduates with a foundation in research,
master’s prepared nurses who have completed a thesis or have had strong
intermediate research instruction, and doctorly prepared nurses with advanced
research preparation are important resources. The last may not be part of the
researcher’s organization but available through an affiliated university.
The
availability of university educated nurses is both an indication of the
education programming needed and whether the environment has a “critical mass”
of nurses for research activities.