Summary
Nursing is a quintessential ‘complex intervention’. It has a critical role to play in meeting health and social care challenges – an aging population, chronic diseases and new endemics at the fore of European health concerns. Increasingly, nurses engage in a wide range of highly complex activities, many of which take place in multiple care environments including acute medicine, chronic care facilities, community and residential homes. Changes in health care organisation internationally (e.g. short hospital periods, growing responsibility for patient self-care) place more health care in the hands of nurses, increasing the scope, the overall need for nursing care and for that care to rest on a solid evidence base.
REFLECTION will bring leading European researchers in nursing together with other multidisciplinary experts in research methods within an overarching complex interventions research framework. Through summer schools and seminar programmes we will disseminate cutting-edge methods of critical importance for developing the scientific evidence base for nursing practice, to current nursing researchers, the new generation of early stage European researchers and to countries where the translation of research knowledge is still being developed. REFLECTION will focus on three activities: 1) Develop an interdisciplinary European Faculty network of researchers in nursing, equipped to design, plan and implement programmatic, mixed methods and complex interventions research in nursing; 2) share knowledge and expertise by running summer schools for early stage researchers in Europe using a complex interventions research methods curriculum; 3) develop programmes of translational research in nursing which are multi-state, multi-disciplinary, and directed at improving the evidence base of nursing to meet European health and social care concerns. We envisage that the REFLECTION network will lead to a step change in the quality and focus of research in nursing throughout Europe to the benefit of European citizens and their health and social care needs.
Duration
5 years, from March 2011 to March 2016 (09-RNP-049)
