An evaluation of the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals 4Ps Programme for the development of nurses, midwives and allied healthcare professionals' research skills.

BACKGROUND: Research forms an important part of clinical practice for nurses, midwives and allied healthcare professionals (NMAHPs). However, it is known there is a lack of confidence in this community in the development and use of research skills. The 4Ps Programme is a bespoke research-training programme that focuses on four areas: place, project, person and plan. AIM: To report an evaluation of the 4Ps Programme that used a survey to record the confidence levels reported by NMAHPs. DISCUSSION: An increase in participants' confidence was observed across all modules in the 4Ps Programme. This exceeded the standard deviation in the 'place' session, demonstrating genuine improvement. It was not possible to demonstrate a significant improvement in all cases. Low response rates affected the quality of the data obtained in the study, which would have benefitted from a more targeted approach to questions and better enabled the tracking of individuals' improvement over the course of the programme. CONCLUSION: Participation in bespoke, targeted training related to research could lead to an increase in NMAHPs' confidence in research-related activities. Efforts need to be made to refine the evaluation approach and improve response rates. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: The 4Ps Programme can improve research-related confidence. Improved and further longitudinal evaluation will assess its impact in developing future clinical academics.

An exploration of the reach of the #MakeSpace4Research hashtag.

BACKGROUND: Use of social media to communicate with and engage health professionals is increasing. A communications campaign at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust used a Twitter hashtag to improve the visibility of nursing, midwifery and allied health professionals research. AIM: This study aimed to explore the reach of the #MakeSpace4Research campaign during its first 12 months. METHODS: Between November 2018 and 2019, data on all tweets containing #MakeSpace4Research were examined using an online analytical tool. The studied variables were: total reach; total impressions; unique authors; total retweets; total mentions; and top tweeters. All these were collated using two separate variables: matching tweets and impact. FINDINGS: #MakeSpace4Research appeared in 6884 tweets, involving 1085 individual Twitter accounts, resulting in more than 16 million impressions. Mentions and impressions both increased threefold, and unique authors more than doubled over the 12-month period. A spike in activity was noted after the campaign was launched at a nursing, midwifery and allied health professionals research conference in May 2019. CONCLUSION: The #MakeSpace4Research campaign has the potential to connect online communities of research-interested nurses, midwives and allied health professionals.

Political cartoonists respond to Medicare.

Debates about health care policy are a rich topic for editorial cartoonists. The 17 cartoons described here, from the period 1944 to 1986, cover the implementation of universal hospital and medical care insurance as well as the subsequent passage of the Canada Health Act. These cartoons by Canada's major cartoonists trace the issues arising from debates over Medicare with characteristic wit and vigour, as they draw on an existing repertoire of visual imagery relating to doctors, patients and health care.