Congratulations to Mary Alvarez, Senior Research Midwife, NBT, who has been selected for the highly competitive NIHR Senior Research Leader Programme: Nursing and Midwifery
The three-year programme aims to “unlock the research potential of many more senior nurses and midwives” by giving them dedicated time to share their learnings across organisations and the wider NHS.
The NIHR wants to “empower senior research leaders to further increase research capacity and capability at a local, regional and national level, and to support their development as future research leaders.”
Having just completed a two-year Masters of Research degree, Mary’s looking forward to having the time to focus on all her ideas, including nurturing midwives’ interest and development in research. She’s focused on enabling research and participation to be taken up by all, and on creating more woman-centred research opportunities.
We can all get behind that!
Mary explains in more detail what she plans to do on the programme:
We know from community midwives that women want information on studies. But given the time pressure on community midwife appointments, I’ve been considering what other options there might be for sharing study details.
I want research to be sewn into clinical care, not just part of it. That can be achieved through more woman-centred research opportunities.
I’m also interested in building strategic relationships, such as relationships in clinical teams. I already have a good network in the West of England and nationally through my role as area research champion. So I’ll be looking to build on that.
I’m particularly looking forward to being matched with a national leader for the mentoring part of the program.
Another goal of mine is around succession planning; getting midwives interested in spending time doing research and bringing students together to learn. There are so many misconceptions around research from midwives, and nurses in general. I remember applying for my first research post and worrying about not being sure of statistics. But midwives and nurses are usually focused on recruiting patients and there are many others with lots of different skillsets who support trials.