Engaging Health & Care Professionals in Research
Page last updated 12 January 2024
To help improve outcomes for our populations, encouraging and facilitating colleagues to get involved in research and promote research opportunities to patients and service users is essential.
How to use this section
This page is includes lots if useful background on how the NIHR supports health and care professionals; including those new to research and those wanting to further their research career.
Each sub-section includes links, videos and reports from various sources that you can use for your own background knowledge or to use as evidence and prompts when engaging health and care professionals.
Encouraging health and care professionals to promote research to patients
Healthcare professionals are often the first port of call for patients who are interested in research. We want to encourage Health and Care Professionals to offer research to their patients, service users and the wider population at the point of contact.
Be Part of Research
'Be Part of Research' is a platform for both lay people and professionals that makes it easy to understand what research is and does and find current research studies in specific clinical areas on its database.
Where patients are asking about research that may not be available in a particular Trust it can be useful. NHS staff can give patients a route into what they might be looking for, or simply and quickly check on the patient's behalf for studies that may suit them.
Surveys have shown that care users and staff have very positive, empowering experiences of research studies.
This short animation includes some of the information on how patients can ask Health and Care Professionals to ask them about research.
Integrating research with service provision
Developing the health and care workforce of the future
Research is an integral part of care. A skilled research delivery workforce, ready for the complex health and care challenges of the future, is crucial to making research happen in the NHS and other health and social care settings.
There are currently over 10,000 front-line research delivery staff working throughout the NHS who are funded or part-funded by the NIHR.
Clinical research nurses and midwives, allied health professionals, social care professionals, doctors, dentists, and clinical research practitioners all play an important role in the delivery of high-quality research and care.
There is evidence that including research in medical roles enhances recruitment and retention, and that some doctors use research as a mechanism to avoid burnout.
Supporting NHS professionals to engage in research
NHS Confederation is pleased to be able to share a suite of resources aimed aimed supporting clinical and care professional leadership. The Network among a number of key stakeholders contributed to these resources which include:
A practical guide to clinical and care professional leadership in systems
Two posters on developing strong clinical and care professional leadership and developing leaders in health and care for the future
A webpage on clinical and care professional leadership highlighting the resources available
Please share these resources widely in the organisations and systems you work across.
Clinical-and-care-professional-leadership_0.pdfHealth and Care Professional Career Development
We support the career development of health and care professionals, with a number of campaigns and initiatives including:
Being a Nurse and a Researcher: Lyndon's story
Research training for Medics
We are offer a course for medics who are new to clinical research in the NHS. The course covers topics such as why research is important, the legislation and frameworks surrounding research and also who is involved in research in the NHS.
This course consists of 4 online modules that will be completed within NIHR Learn.
A Social Care Professionals first steps into research
Hannah Cann is a participation officer with looked-after children at Southampton City Council. She used the research training and career development opportunities available to her during an NIHR Local Authority Short Placement Award for Research Collaboration (LA SPARC) to support the next phase of her practitioner research career; an NIHR Pre-doctoral Local Authority Academic Fellowship (PLAF). Share Hannah's story about undertaking a career development short placement as a social care professional with social care professionals you work with.
Supporting Health & Care Professionals to use research evidence
Everyone providing care uses research. But not everyone is aware of it. The core of all good training is that it is based on evidence which can be trusted.
The NIHR not only funds research, we also share research findings that could make a difference to how practice is carried out. Take a look at our NIHR Evidence website to discover summaries of the NIHR research that we believe is the most likely to make change.
