Supporting research leadership roles for nurses and midwives

NIHR nursing and midwifery

Nurses and midwives are the largest group of health and care professionals and make an unparalleled contribution to clinical research, making a real difference to people’s lives. The NIHR nursing and midwifery vision is to inspire nurses and midwives to improve people’s health through research.

Following on from previous successful initiatives, we are developing a range of new funding opportunities to ensure nurses and midwives can develop rewarding careers in research. Examples of our programmes and areas of current work are highlighted below, with more details on our website

NIHR director of nursing and midwifery, Professor Ruth Endacott emphasises that “nurses and midwives are at the heart of plans for research in England, with shared goals to make research everyone’s business. NIHR provides funding to undertake research that matters and to ensure career opportunities reach all eligible health and care professionals”

Following the success of the 70@70 programme, the Senior Research Leader (SRL) Programme for Nurses and Midwives launched in April 2023 with a first cohort of 35 nurses and midwives. The programme aims to provide protected time for senior nurse and midwife research leaders to build and develop research capability and capacity for nurses and midwives working across their organisations, regionally and beyond. The programme is open to nurses and midwives on an annual basis (25 places) with applications for cohort 3 closing on 31 October 2024. Applications from nurses and midwives working in any setting that delivers Department of Health and Social Care funded services are welcomed.

Our Research Career Pathway Project is now complete and highlights opportunities that promote movement between various roles in research. The nursing and midwifery webpages on the NIHR website highlight the myriad of opportunities for nurses and midwives to engage in research wherever they work and at all stages of their careers. This includes enthusing young people to learn about research, introducing pre-registration students and newly qualified staff to research, and embedding research into trust inductions. Guidance has also been developed for creating hybrid practice-based and research-related roles for nurses and midwives across all settings.

In collaboration with NHS organisations and higher education institutions, a newly created resource aimed at pre-registration nursing and midwifery students provides an overview of clinical research delivery. This has already been embedded into some student pre-registration curricula and will be widely available soon.

Advanced clinical practitioners (ACPs) need to meet a stringent framework for undertaking expanded practice. We are collaborating with ACPs who work in research to ensure that they can transfer their expert practice into research settings as autonomous practitioners and are also facilitating an international group to highlight the benefits of ACPs in research to all stakeholders.

The NIHR has supported the pilot of a hybrid research placement model for pre-registration nursing students working in mental health settings. This placement model will enable nursing students embedded in certain clinical placement areas to be linked with their local NHS research and development team so that they can gain first-hand knowledge and experience of clinical research. The pilot builds on the work initiated at Leeds and York Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust and involves four NHS mental health trusts in England

Developing research-related roles for nurses and midwives in community, public health, primary care and social care settings requires specific focus. We are engaging with nurses and midwives to highlight research within the community, public health, primary and social care. Our RISE (Research In Community Settings) project aims to enable successful research initiatives and activities. There is a drive for increased out of hospital research and nurses and midwives are well placed to support, lead and deliver research in these settings.

Nursing and midwifery acknowledges that social care is underserved in current research development opportunities and that there is a need to support social care nurses and midwives to become more research active. We have been engaging with the social care sector and following a period of stakeholder engagement we have plans to commence a bespoke social care specific programme in 2025. We hope that this will improve opportunities for social care nurses to acquire research skills and experience, with the aim of developing research capacity and capability within social care nursing.

Our Principal Investigator Pipeline Programme (PIPP) develops research nurses and midwives as new principal investigators (PIs).  It has four main elements: theory, supervised practice, independent learning and leading others through mentorship. This programme launched in July 2023 and is very popular. Cohort 2 has just started on their PI journey and most recently one of the PIPP delegates presented at an international conference highlighting this great programme from the NIHR.

We look forward to supporting your involvement and engagement in research.