The Royal College of Nursing recently hosted their 60th annual International Nursing Research Conference at Hallam. Over 300 delegates attended to discuss this year’s theme of impact and how it could be achieved. Many of our nursing and midwifery academics presented sessions, posters and workshops on various research projects. They were joined by both clinical practice partners and students as co-presenters from collaborative projects.
Dr Jo Lidster (deputy head of nursing and midwifery) was one of the Sheffield Hallam academics involved with presenting at the conference. Here’s Jo describing both her research project and her involvement at the conference:
“As we regularly see in the news, there is a national shortage of nurses – over 40,000 vacancies. Trusts and organisations are trying out new initiatives to attract nurse graduates to work with them and in particular with hard-to-recruit-to services, for example elderly care. One local response to this is the Compass Programme, designed and facilitated by Rotherham Hospital Foundation Trust (RHFT). This involves a rotation programme to expose nurses to a range of services within the trust, whilst providing the new graduate nurses with additional peer and mentor support.
Mary & Jo presenting at the conference
“I have recently worked in collaboration with Mary Dougan (RHFT) to complete a mixed methods evaluative study of the Compass Programme. We presented this at the recent RCN International conference. Data was collected from a Compass cohort over a 12-month period using surveys, self-assessment tools and focus group interviews. Data was also collected from cohort of graduate nurses starting employment with the trust, but not on the Compass Programme. The findings were extremely positive and the cohort were very satisfied overall with the programme.
“The evaluation found that the aims of the programme were exceeded, with many benefits for the nurses on the programme as well as the trust. In particular, it provides an enhanced recruitment opportunity; valuable rotation experience; opportunity to create an adaptable and flexible workforce; accelerated skills development; enhanced supportive mechanisms and an opportunity to consistently put the patient first. From the nurses perspective, they were very satisfied with their skills they had developed and had an increase in their job satisfaction scores, in particular concerning support, learning/development, and career development.”
