Arancha de la Horra: Nurses in Research

My name is Arancha de la Horra, I'm the project lead for Global Research Nurses (group of The Global Health Network). Global Research Nurses focuses on supporting nurses and midwives from low- and middle-income countries to get involved in research, to learn the skills about research and to ultimately lead in research. We do that through two key activities: the first one is called Research Capacity Strengthening Activities, usually it takes the shape of workshops; the second activity, we run a programme of small grants, and all this takes place in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

An example of these activities is the series of workshops that we are conducting in Ethiopia. These are focused on supporting or enhancing the skills around qualitative research for nurses. The key area about this project is that it’s divided in three modules. The first one is around developing your proposal, and the nurses that are taking part in this, they learn about the skills and then they develop the proposal. The next one is about data, learning to collect data. And the third one is about learning to write the manuscripts, and at the end of this project we will have four completed research projects with a policy brief as well. So that's great, but also what we’d like to do is to capture the impact that these activities have on nurses and midwives. An example of that is the Journey of Flavia Rocha from Buenos Aires in Argentina. She is a maternity nurse, and she was awarded a small grant to travel to attend a Symposium, the Burdett RISE Symposium in Cape Town at the end of 2022. She had not been involved in research prior to that, but she gained the confidence and the knowledge by attending the Symposium, and when she went back to her institution, she started a research project, and she was the first one ever to research in her hospital. From that point she became the expert in research, and she trained nurses, midwives, doctors and all healthcare professionals.

The three big challenges that we've got at the moment are the lack of awareness for nurses and midwives about the role that they could have in research. Another one linked to that is that, despite nurses and midwives being the largest workforce in healthcare, they are underrepresented in leadership and at the decision-making table. And the third challenge that we've got is retention. This project is working to address these challenges by raising awareness of the role the nurses and midwives can have in research, also supporting nurses and midwives to develop these skills that will take them to the top level to the leadership roles. By getting involved in research, nurses will enjoy the job better as they are able to decide, to be part of the decision-making process of improving health care, and it will also offer a new opportunity for career development and career progression, helping retention.

Nurses are the primary providers of care. We are the professionals that spend the most time with the patient, and this puts us in a unique position to understand the key challenges around health, the cultural determinants around that, and the full socioeconomic picture around these health challenges. With that, we can identify the key gaps in care and set up a research project to improve care and to do that around making it patient-focused care.

It's crucial that nurses and midwives in low- and middle-income countries take an active role in improving care. Recently I saw a presentation; one of the slides that stayed with me said: in God with trust, everybody else needs to bring data, and midwives need to bring data. We need data to improve care and to be able to have a say on how that care is improved. Investing in nursing- and midwifery-lead research will improve healthcare and healthcare systems globally.

This interview was recorded in July 2024.