Abstract
In this double edition of JRN we present ten papers from England, Mexico, Indonesia, Iran and Turkey, each with their associated commentary, that all say something about the contemporary nursing workforce and what it’s like working in challenging circumstances – from nursing during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and its sequelae to understanding the emotional labour of nursing through to advancing research capacity, capability, awareness, leadership and career pathways in nursing where the practice often seems more challenging that the policy would suggest.
As well as introducing these papers, we take the opportunity in this edition to celebrate the JRN Veronica Bishop paper of the year and we acknowledge the prize-winning stand-out contributions at the Royal College of Nursing International Nursing Research Conference this year, which JRN sponsored.
But first we have an editorial from JRN Editorial Board members Mark White and Gordon Hill who have curated an online collection of papers previously published in JRN that all have something to say about nursing through times of challenge and adversity. These peer-reviewed papers will all be available to access through a ‘Special Collection’ located at the foot of our webpage in the ‘You Might be interested in’ section, for a limited period only.
The four papers that follow the special collection editorial contribute to our understanding of nursing during the Covid 19 pandemic: from the impact on nurses of their redeployment; nurses’ fear of contagion and the presence of burnout syndrome; work alienation and last, but not least, workplace violence. They certainly don’t paint a very rosy picture of the global challenges nurses faced during and since the pandemic but it is arguably timely that we publish these papers now when many countries are reflecting on how their Governments managed the pandemic in order to understand what can be learned from that and how we can collectively be better prepared for the next one (e.g. UK Covid Inquiry, 2023).
Whilst not explicitly related to the impact of the pandemic, the three papers which follow also highlight the challenges of contemporary nursing and how they may be mitigated: from understanding perceived stress in nursing students to exploring relationships between burnout and compassion fatigue and the mediating role of empathy through to the impact of unpredictable shift work on work-family conflict, the potential to impact negatively on nursing practice and the nurse managers’ role in this conflict resolution.
The final three papers in this edition focus on research: the first paper presents an initial impact evaluation of a national initiative to increase research leadership capacity and capability in nursing and use of research to increase the health of its population, in practice: the first describes the impact of a partnership between a clinical school and NHS partners through the development, implementation and service evaluation of a joint strategy to build research capacity, capability and career development opportunities; the final paper in this edition reports on a survey to ascertain whether research was included in NHS Trust induction programmes and offers recommendations on how to address the paucity of evidence of activity that emerged.
Examining the presence and indeed the absence of the links between health and social care policy and practice is what underpins JRN’s raison d’être and indeed these links and the potential of the research that we publish to impact on policy and/or practice is what informs the decision making for our paper of the year award. After a robust shortlisting process, our three independent judges unanimously selected a paper published in the focus edition Conflicts, Catastrophes and Consequences, guest edited by editorial board members Lorraine Culley and Sam Porter. The paper selected was
This year the scientific committee of the RCN International Nursing Research conference carried on the tradition of awarding JRN sponsored prizes for both oral presentations and for posters presentations. However, the committee introduced a novel approach to selecting the papers for oral presentation awards this year by electing to identify abstracts that received the highest ratings from the international scientific advisory panel reviewers within two specific categories. Category 1 was ringfenced for abstracts submitted by research students and Category 2 was for all other submissions. As part of their award, each author was invited to deliver their paper in a plenary session rather than in the ‘standard’ concurrent session.
The winner of the student category was Claire Ford, University of Manchester. Between submitting her abstract and presenting her paper, Dr Ford had been awarded her PhD. The title of her paper was
Professor Joanne Brook, Birmingham City University was the winner of the second category award for her abstract
The poster presentation awards followed the ‘traditional’ conference format where each day poster tours were run during the lunchtime break and delegates were invited to view the posters throughout the day and nominate their ‘poster of the day’. This year nominations were invited via the conference app. The poster that won on day 1 was presented by Aoife Conway, University of Ulster -
On day 2, Debbie Clark, University of Leeds won the award for her poster
And on day 3, the award went to Louise Jones, Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust for her poster