Nurse Researcher in the Clinical Setting

Clinical Setting Nursing Research 

Nurse Researcher,Responsibilities of Nursing Researchers,Skill Needed For a Nursing Researcher

Nurse Researcher

     The term nurse researcher in the clinical setting is used to denote nurses who have research as one of their responsibilities or their sole responsibility and are at least partly supported by salary from a clinical setting, inclusive of hospitals, clinics, and other agencies providing health care to patients. 

    Such nurses are usually prepared at the doctoral level but sometimes at the master's level. The additional responsibilities of these individuals may include education, quality improvement, evaluation in the clinical facility, and the requisite administration accompanying those duties. 

    The position in the clinical setting can be either line or staff. The individual also may be jointly appointed to a school or college of nursing or another health-related institution for a percentage of their time.

Responsibilities of Nursing Researchers

    The specific responsibilities for these individuals include conducting research and assisting others in conducting, applying, and utilizing research. Although those are the explicit role responsibilities, the nurse researcher in a clinical setting is expected to affect the nursing staff positively in several indirect ways.

    The nurse researcher is an educator, teaching about the research process, guiding critiques of completed research for application and utilization, and developing research days for sharing of research. The researcher is involved in the professional development of staff, facilitating staff to present and publish their databased projects under the tutelage of the researcher. 

    Nurse researchers in clinical agencies usually have the responsibility to represent the agency without side researchers using the agency as a data collection site. In the role of change agent, the researcher helps to make practice research based. 

    The change agent role and the researcher role are often combined with the quality control role, where pre and post-monitoring or longitudinal monitoring around a change are needed.

Skill Needed For a Nursing Researcher

    To carry out these responsibilities, the researcher must possess several attributes. Knowledge and skills in the research are the most obvious, but equally important are people skills (eg, motivating, confirming, guiding professional development) and conceptual skills. 

    The latter set of skills comes into play in several ways, for example, identifying a researchable problem and reworking complaints and questions into a basis for finding solutions.

 Differences In Academic and Clinical Research

    A major difference between the academic researcher and the nurse researcher in the clinical setting is the mission of the employer. The university has a societal responsibility for knowledge advancement.     

The health care institution has a responsibility for health care. Mission is a key work environment characteristic , and the work environment has a pro found impact on the outcomes of one's work. This is especially true for nurse researchers in clinical settings, whose outcomes are influenced by their environment. 

Within clinical agencies the following have been associated with research productivity: 

(a) research culture (policies and procedures indicative of a consistent commitment to nursing research, such as the presence of research in the agency's mission).

(b) resources for research activities (eg, library holdings, funding of research activities, presence of other nurses with advanced nursing education).

(c) attitudes (eg, belief that the public and other professional colleagues value nursing research.

(d) esprit, a positive group work morale. Clearly, these nurse researcher roles are complex and not an insignificant addition to any staff.

    One of the first tasks for the nurse researcher new to a setting is to assess the work environment, including the resources available. In particular, the nurse researcher cannot function well if isolated from others with research skills. 

    Baccalaureate graduates with a foundation in research, master's prepared nurses who have completed a thesis or have had strong intermediate research instruction, and doctorly prepared nurses with advanced research preparation are important resources. The last may not be part of the researcher's organization but available through an affiliated university. 

    The availability of university educated nurses is both an indication of the education programming needed and whether the environment has a “critical mass” of nurses for research activities.