A trust developed a bespoke digital dashboard that records health professionals’ research activity and funding applications
Abstract
The accurate and timely capture of data to illustrate progress towards and outputs from research capacity-building endeavours is fundamental to progressing the clinical academic agenda for the benefit of patients, nurses, midwives and allied health professionals. A trust developed a digital dashboard to collect and analyse data on research activity. The digital dashboard has improved the trust’s activity reporting and strategic planning.
Citation: Tinkler L, Pope F (2024) A dashboard to capture nursing and midwifery research activity. Nursing Times [online]; 120: 1.
Authors: Linda Tinkler is trust lead for nursing, midwifery and allied health professional research, the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, honorary research fellow, University of Sheffield, and visiting fellow, Northumbria University; Felicity Pope is clinical project coordinator for nursing, midwifery and allied health professional research, the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
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Introduction
Nurses, midwives and allied health professionals (NMAHPs) at the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust are supported in their research activities by a dedicated NMAHP research team. This team is led by the trust lead for NMAHP research and reports into the executive chief nurse team; it develops and delivers on the capacity- and capability-building agenda at both strategic and operational levels. The trust aims to inspire and enable NMAHPs to progress their research aspirations within and alongside their clinical practice and is committed to a research-active and research-informed culture.
Evidence suggests that research-active environments have better clinical outcomes (Boaz et al, 2020; Ozdemir et al, 2015). Because NMAHPs work closely with patients, they are valuable to the wider clinical research landscape, with the potential to positively influence patient care (Jones and Keenan, 2021). Enabling NMAHPs to lead their own research is not only important for patient outcomes; it can also increase job satisfaction, workforce retention and job desirability (Trusson et al, 2021; Baltrucks and Callaghan, 2018; Hanney et al, 2013). By actively allowing time to carry out research and improve knowledge of the research landscape, organisations can help facilitate a thriving and research-active culture among the NMAHP professions.
In recent years, NMAHP research has been increasingly recognised at both local and national levels. Through the launch of national strategies, commitments have been made to enable clinical research activity within the NMAHP workforce: clear aspirations to develop research capacity and capability have been set out in the strategies published by the chief nursing officer for England (NHS England and NHS Improvement, 2021), the chief midwifery officer for England (NHS England, 2023) and Health Education England (2022). The three strategies share an ambition to create a people-centred research environment that is fully embedded in practice. As a result, there is a more visible and tangible commitment to furthering the capacity and capability of NMAHPs, and developing them into clinical academics of the future.
The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s (2022) five-year NMAHP strategy includes a dedicated research priority, designed to strengthen our research impact and increase our capacity and partnership working. The trust has created bespoke research-related training packages, including the pioneering four Ps programme, which focuses on four areas important in the process of putting together a research funding application: place, project, person and plan.
“We were one of many institutions keen to establish a robust way to capture accurate data to demonstrate impact”
A range of opportunities to develop have also been established, both internally through dedicated charitable funding from the Newcastle Hospitals Charity, and through external partnerships with higher education institutions. In addition, the trust is one of five partners in Newcastle Health Innovation Partners, an Academic Health Science Centre designated by NHS England and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). The trust’s overarching research strategy has, therefore, committed to both enabling research within clinical teams and allowing protected time to support this research.
However, capturing accurate data on this increasing NMAHP research activity has been challenging to achieve locally, and we have observed through informal conversations that this challenge is mirrored elsewhere in similar organisations. Due to a reliance on self-reporting and organisational soft intelligence, we recognised that our contributions to national annual progress data were at risk of limited accuracy and, therefore, value. The team relied on a manually administrated Excel spreadsheet, which captured research activity across the trust. As the number of research-active NMAHPs increased, the spreadsheet became unwieldy, and interrogating data for progress reports was time-consuming and susceptible to errors.
Developing the dashboard
A desire to coalesce research activity across professions meant that we were one of many institutions keen to establish a robust way to capture accurate data to demonstrate impact (Newington et al, 2023). This led to the idea for an innovative research dashboard that would enable the team to:
- Collect and analyse data on support, mentorship and training offered, as well as profession- and specialty-specific activity;
- Track external funding applications.
The aim was to ensure the dashboard made data easily accessible to the NMAHP research team and could facilitate report extraction to proactively steer strategy and development work for the benefit of our trust’s staff and patients.
Development of the dashboard required the NMAHP research team to define and refine its requirements, and the software development team to build, test, fix and refine it. These consultation, development and testing activities took three years (Fig 1), after which a dedicated, centrally held, digital NMAHP research activity dashboard was launched in 2022.
The NMAHP research dashboard is held on a web-based application linked to the electronic staff record; this enables activity, support, training and outputs to be allocated to individual members of staff who are progressing along research pathways. Informed consent is sought prior to any data collection. We use a standard statement to gain permission to enter data on the dashboard, explaining its use, storage and value in supporting them and us to develop meaningful strategies and support for the research agenda.
There are three access points to the dashboard: the data entry landing page, the administrative landing page, and the reporting landing page. Each page requires specific permissions and is only accessible to those with the relevant security policy clearance. These pages are discussed below.
The data entry landing page
Information is entered onto the dashboard by searching for a staff member and allocating the relevant research activities, using the fields shown in Table 1.
The research activity field (Table 1) categorises activities via three options: publication, support or programme. When the publication option is selected, additional fields appear to enter the article title, journal title and relevant dates.
Support activities include attendance at one-to-one sessions and support groups. The date and attendance status can be added to capture rates of both appointments not being attended and the volume of one-to-one and support group work undertaken by the team.
The programme option can be selected as either competitive or non-competitive. The non-competitive category covers training and development programmes, such as our four Ps researcher-development programme, as well as any other non-competitive programmes or awards. The start date and duration are entered, and the end date is automatically calculated. The competitive category covers internal and external grant and fellowship applications or programmes. When selected, conditional fields appear to capture the higher education institute partner and funding amount, as well as a drop-down list allowing the application status to be selected (awaiting outcome, successful, unsuccessful, deferred or not taken up).
Data entered and any changes are automatically tracked. This robustly captured activity means that, when an individual contacts us, any member of the team can quickly see the last conversation and any guidance already given.
“By actively allowing time to carry out research, organisations can help facilitate a thriving and research-active culture”
The administrative landing page
The administrative landing page is where new data fields can be added, to enable data collection on the data entry landing page. An example is adding a new funding stream, such as the recently revised NIHR Advanced Clinical and Practitioner Academic Fellowship. The administrative landing page is also used to pre-populate the drop-down lists in Table 1.
The reporting landing page
The reporting landing page is a separate application, linked to the data entry landing page via the business information team. This enables those with permitted access to generate visual reports on data categories and research activity, as well as progress updates that are reported to the trust’s executive chief nurse.
Discussion
Clinical academics
NMAHP research activity has increased over the last 20 years, with growing numbers of NMAHP principal investigators, increased publication outputs, more funding opportunities and access to external and internal training (Jones and Keenan, 2021). Contributing to this increase is, in part, the multiprofessional approach to research (Jones and Keenan, 2021; Trusson et al, 2021).
NMAHPs connect across broad multidisciplinary teams, working closely with patients and service users. They are well positioned to identify pertinent research questions and implement clinical research that makes a substantial impact and drives positive outcomes (Jones and Keenan, 2021; Cowley et al, 2020). However, despite this, NMAHP clinical academics make up <0.1% of the workforce in the UK (Baltrucks and Callaghan, 2018).
The Council of Deans of Health defines clinical academics as health professionals who “work in higher education institutions […] while providing clinical expertise to health and social care services” (Baltrucks and Callaghan, 2018). Despite attempts such as this to define the meaning of the term clinical academic, it lacks clarity and its meaning varies dependent on usage (Newington et al, 2022). The nature and limits of such terminology risk the accuracy and representativeness of data contributing to national strategies. A clearer definition of the term clinical academic, that includes all research-active NMAHPs, would facilitate a more accurate picture of the research activity within NHS trusts at all levels.
Representative of the many ways in which NMAHPs can engage with research, within the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust there are >350 research-active NMAHPs, across 15 professions and 23 research themes. This demonstrates that 5.6% of the NMAHP workforce is actively engaged in some stage of the research pathway, including but not limited to:
- Undertaking a fellowship;
- Receiving mentorship and support to progress research (via one-to-one clinics and/or support groups);
- Publishing research in a peer-reviewed journal;
- Participating in a research-specific education programme.
Furthermore, 0.2% of the trust’s NMAHP workforce is at the postdoctoral level and 0.9% are classed as principal investigators.
It is important to find a term that represents the many ways that NMAHPs can be research-active. By developing the research dashboard, the team has improved the accuracy and timeliness of data collection across all NMAHP research-related activity within the trust. We anticipate the data will illustrate support for, progress towards and outputs from research capacity-building endeavours. This is fundamental to progressing the clinical academic agenda for the benefit of both patients and NMAHPs.
“By actively allowing time to carry out research, organisations can help facilitate a thriving and research-active culture”
Reporting
Delivering on the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s (2022) NMAHP research strategy involves achieving a demonstrable increase in capacity and capability. Before implementing the dashboard, this proved challenging, due to a reliance on organisational soft intelligence and self-reporting. For example, to collect data in 2020 for the Council of Deans of Health’s annual Clinical Academic Roles Implementation Network research survey, we asked staff to complete a retrospective survey detailing their research activity; only 3.3% of the trust’s NMAHP workforce (n=200) responded to the request. Although retrospective surveys can be useful, they carry the risks of missing information, responder bias and recall bias, impacting the accuracy and completeness of data (Talari and Goyal, 2020). Furthermore, without truly representative baseline data, progress reports are at risk of inaccuracy, especially where the aim is longitudinal data to report on year-on-year progress.
To develop an NMAHP workforce that is actively involved in research in multiple ways, it is necessary to accurately represent all individuals on their research journey. The dashboard has the potential to achieve this, providing an insight into all reportable NMAHP research activity within the trust – assuming the NMAHP research team is made aware of or involved in supporting this activity.
Impact
The development and implementation of the dashboard are ongoing. However, to date, it has improved the identification of areas of both strength and unmet need; this includes the volume of research as well as its outputs and impact. This enables better planning to support capacity building in underrepresented areas. We anticipate this targeted approach will facilitate improved equity across the NMAHP professions in their access to and success with research endeavours.
The dashboard can display the status of NMAHPs’ current funding applications. This enables the team to keep track of progress, whereas previously, notifications may only have been received in relation to successful applications. It is important to follow up with individuals who are unsuccessful in an application, to ensure they are supported to reflect positively on feedback and encouraged to either reapply or seek a different opportunity.
The dashboard has, so far, proven to be a powerful tool with considerable potential to inform and advance the capacity- and capability-building agenda within NMAHP research at the trust. There are additional benefits to collecting and analysing data on the progress, activity and impact of research-active NMAHPs. These include the ability to connect individuals across settings, roles and career stages, and the ability to demonstrate the time, resources and infrastructure required to truly support research capacity-building endeavours. The latter is often tacit and requires vision, executive-level backing and funding to be sustainable. Both of these elements are increasingly visible as a result of our dashboard and are key in strategic planning and future-proofing services responsible for capacity building.
The iterative development and testing of the dashboard continue. The greater functionality and analysis abilities have improved our strategic planning, reduced delays, streamlined communication and improved accuracy. They have also reduced risk in terms of governance of research activity and missed opportunities. We expect that longitudinal data collection will facilitate an increasing range of strategic possibilities from an individual, organisational and national perspective.
We have increased the visibility of the trust’s NMAHP research community by disseminating work at conferences and directly to other NHS organisations. Because NMAHPs inhabit a unique space, we hope this visibility will inspire others, developing a research-active NMAHP culture nationally and improving patient outcomes.
Challenges
The overarching challenge in developing the dashboard was limited capacity, within both the NMAHP research team and the software development team. Due to this, the dashboard’s launch was delayed, and resolving subsequent and unexpected errors continues to be time-consuming. However, because the development of the dashboard is an iterative and ongoing process, we anticipate these issues will continue to arise with use over time.
We intend to add new fields as the need arises. For example, we have recently added fields to reflect higher education institute partners in research grants and fellowships, as well as the attendance status of training programmes and one-to-one research clinics. We anticipate that user feedback and its regular use in reporting to senior leadership teams across the trust will continue to inform and develop the software to make it more intuitive and user-friendly.
Conclusion and future plans
The research dashboard has been a beneficial addition to the NMAHP research team. In its short lifespan to date, it has improved the trust’s activity reporting and strategic planning. It has also allowed us to increase the visibility of our NMAHP research community.
Moving forward, our focus is on demonstrating the impact of the research activity, and we are actively considering how other research-impact tools might inform the dashboard’s development. We also aim to enable the model to be shared with other organisations, although this will be dependent on the compatibility of IT systems, dashboards and coding. The successful roll-out of the dashboard has, however, demonstrated its utility and will allow other organisations to view its potential within their own context.
Key points
- National strategies have committed to enabling clinical research activity for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals
- A trust has increased research opportunities through dedicated funding and external partnerships
- Capturing data on this activity has been difficult, posing a risk to its accuracy
- The trust developed a bespoke digital dashboard that records health professionals’ research activity and funding applications
- This has improved data collection and analysis, making reporting easier and more accurate
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