ESTABLISHING PRIORITIES FOR RESEARCH IN EDUCATION WITHIN ONE COLLEGE OF NURSING AND MIDWIFERY

The educational provision for nurses and midwives is currently undergo ing immense change, These innovations encompass the organizational str ucture, the process of delivery and the projected outcomes for profess ional education within the UK. There is, however, a dearth of publishe d research evidence designed to evaluate these educational changes. Ne vertheless, anecdotal evidence suggests that within individual institu tions small-scale, educationally-focused research is currently being c onducted, These are usually 'one of P studies which address questions of personal interest to individual researchers rather than issues of i mportance to the organization or to the professions as a whole, The ne t result is a diverse research portfolio which, by its very nature, is wasteful in terms of lost opportunity to commission larger-scale rese arch which might influence educational practice and in failing to dire ct effectively the energies and skills of researchers. In an attempt t o address these issues and to set an agenda for research priorities wi thin one college of nursing and midwifery, a four-round Delphi survey was conducted, This is the first of its kind to be reported in the UK literature, Fifty six of the teaching staff (77% of the total number o f teaching staff) initially identified 213 issues which were grouped i nto 14 categories, The interrater reliability of the categorization pr ocess was checked on three separate occasions, In successive rounds, h igh response rates were maintained, To test for the manipulative effec t of providing respondents with controlled feedback of their score in round 2, the third questionnaire was completed 'blind' to previous sco res, In the final round, participants were provided with feedback and invited to re-score and rank the items. The final round yielded 28 pri oritized items, It was notable that the top ten issues primarily focus ed upon the preregistration (Project 2000) provision encompassing both the preparation of students for professional practice and the changin g role of the nurse/midwife teacher, This paper explores the implicati ons of these findings for setting a research agenda within the organiz ation.,