Innocents in the research jungle

Today sees the formal integration of North Trent College of Nursing and Midwifery with Sheffield University, after months of negotiations which were dominated by the question of the transfer of pension rights from the National Health Service to the university. Nearly 200 nursing and midwifery tutors are joining Sheffield University as nursing and midwifery lecturers, expanding total lecturer numbers by nearly 20 per cent.

The merger, one of the largest in the country, was at different times on or off depending on which minister had said what to whom. Large amounts of money were involved, and in higher education cash talks. What was missing in this discussion was the question of research. Will staff who are transferred into universities be able to cope with the requirement to do research?

Following the decision to move nurse education into higher education, the NHS invited tenders from colleges and universities. Resp- onses were largely governed by an eye to the financial benefits that would follow a merger rather than the desire to propel nurse and midwifery teaching down a professional/academic route involving research. The result has been a variety of mergers with different colleges of health going into different types of institution. Each of these has its own culture, tradition and research requirements. Each will also have different expectations of the nurse and midwife lecturers who increasingly seem to be innocents abroad, caught up in a national muddle about their future.

What has determined which nursing colleges merge with traditional rather than new universities? What differences were apparent in the quality of their tenders? Certainly it had nothing to do with the ability of the lecturers in those colleges to do research. Yet research is what many of them may be required to do. Will nursing and midwifery lecturers developing their research profiles be expected to do more teaching than other academics because that is what they do now? Where contracts stipulate research and scholarship, will there be the time?

In Sheffield it was agreed that the nursing and midwifery lecturers should not do research unless they wished to. Their absorption into the university will be as lecturers with equal status to their more traditional academic colleagues, but without the requirement to do research. The hope is that they will develop research profiles capable of attracting funding; the danger is that this is unrealistic.

Consequently, we are faced with a dramatic change in work practices; while some academics are dealing with the prospect of declining research, we have a large new group of experienced teachers setting off in the other direction and developing research profiles mid-career. Research cannot be timetabled and is often all pervasive. Indeed those academics who have been researching in pre-clinical and clinical areas for many years may view their nurse and midwifery colleagues as practitioners teaching a practice and not theorists pioneering their ideas.

The tendering process has therefore arbitrarily launched some nursing and midwifery lecturers into an academic culture which may be daunting. Universities should reflect on how these new members of staff will cope. They will need support, including time to build up research expertise.

Let us hope the academic community will allow their new colleagues this time.

Brian Everett is regional assistant general secretary (north) of the Association of University Teachers.