I think you need to be quite careful that you don’t that you move things on quite quickly yourself. Because I, I’m in this role and I’ve done it for just over a year, and I feel that I need to move on. And I feel that there isn’t a clear route, it’s not that if you do this for so many, you demonstrate that you’ve done this and you do it for a year, then we’ll move you up to a Band 7, you have to, you have to be quite pro-active, pro-active in your own career.

So that would be the one thing I would probably tell people to advise, that you have to, you have to know what you want to do next because you could quite easily sit in a role for quite a number of years, doing the same thing. It gets quite comfortable and ultimately, you’re in academics and like I said before, your name doesn’t tend to appear on any papers, so if it’s some, it that’s something that you want you need to fight for it, and you need to really push for that. Or you need to think about your own research and whether you’re going to do a Master’s or a PhD, or just your own research project in general, but you need to, I think you need to think further ahead than I’m just going to go into research.

I’m interested in lots of different things I’d like to have I would like to do a PhD in the future I’m trying to publish my research from the Master’s which I think is the first, kind of the first step towards PhD which takes longer than I would have hoped but I think yes that’s probably what my career progression would be. I would like, there are many things I’m interested in so it’s not it also depends on what’s available and what’s, you know, needed at certain time and, and place. I’d like to think that I’d like to move to higher education as well maybe one day be able to teach I’d like to work as a consultant midwife as well one day, I think it’s a very important role so I’d love to do that. But I would love to find a job I’m, you know, comfortable with and maybe promoting research at the consultant level, I think that would be probably my ideal, ideal job. But yeah it would depend, it depends on what’s available and most times I it can happen that you know, you might change your minds in your career and what, what you like and what you hope but at the moment I feel like that’s something I would like to do, yeah.

I guess people that do a PhD will get involved in, in teaching quite a lot. And, but again within, within research that’s-, as a physio like any other professional, health professional, there’s a lot of things you can do. Yeah from being, from becoming a professor and having your own, own trials, as specialising in clinical trial management, and being-, and later on being the manager of a unit and having your- your unit with trial managers and trial coordinators, so working with you. As simple as focussing and recruiting on the Clinical Research Network and recruiting patients for physio trials. So, on this particular trial we don’t have any objective assessments, but some trials do, and sometimes they are required to be physios or in or nurses to do that specific assessment. So yeah, there’s a lot of things, even inside research as a physio or as an occupational therapist, as a nurse, you can go to. I think it’s pretty much an open book [laughs] once you get into it.

So now I’m on a sort of a three-year trajectory I suppose on, on three different research projects, one of which I’m a co- investigator on, so I was on the application for the funding, and we got the funding, so I’m a researcher and a co-investigator on it, which is really good. Obviously that’s a fixed term affair, so I’m going to be a researcher, a post-doc researcher, for well I’m a year in, so the next two years. And beyond that I don’t know. I don’t feel particularly inclined to be a lecturer, that might change, so, but that’s, that sort of the long term employed permanent position way to go, within academia. I don’t feel particularly inclined to be a permanent position, clinical speech therapist in a, an NHS setting for instance. But I don’t know where that leaves me, so I guess I’ve just been enthusiastic about everything I do up until now, and opportunities have presented themselves, and I’ve seized them. And I don’t necessarily always know quite what it’s going to be, but I’m quite open to the next interesting thing, so, watch this space, I suppose.

I’m very open-minded really, about the future. I would, I wouldn’t- I’d never say never to anything. And if you ask me again- If we were to meet again in five years, and I was an electrician, I wouldn’t be surprised. Or if I was back working on a ward, I wouldn’t be surprised at that either. I’m really open about what will happen. Short term, I think I will definitely be staying as a research nurse. But I’m open-minded as to what the future may hold. And you know, the- Will the NHS be privatised? Will fundings be cut? I’m, I’m just totally open to where life might go.

No. I was no, I don’t. I think at the moment it affords me a really good work-life balance and there are lots of opportunities that come with it, especially in the project that I’ve just finished. And, you know, there was there was a lectureship that came up at [university] and the head of the course at [university] told me I should apply cos I’d been and done the seminars and stuff [baby noise]. And I didn’t because I thought my work-life balance would completely change, but I feel like that’s probably the direction I’m going to go in one way or another. Whether that’s, that means doing a PhD or not, I don’t know. I really-, I really value what I do now for the opportunities it’s given me but it’s essentially, it’s doing someone else’s research for them and I just don’t find that very interesting at the end of the day, compared to doing my own research, I just found it a lot more fulfilling I guess.

Well there’s, there are Band 7 senior research midwives, who, it, again it’s the same as a normal job, you do, you kind of have to wait for the opening and then apply. And they would be, you would definitely need experience for that, and they have more of a, an oversight of a lot more studies, and they’re, they supervise junior research midwives, and then, so there’s the NIHR, have a, a scheme for health professionals, to do their own research project. So they fund it, so you need to, but it’s a bit, bit like kind of applying for a PhD, you have to formulate your own research proposal and apply, and they would give you the funding to, and they would also fund it in such a way that you can maybe continue with a bit of clinical work and then, you know, half your week is actually dedicated to your research. And then you know you write that up. Unfortunately, that used to be a master’s degree, and then when I wanted to do it this year, they stopped the funding.

So, I would, that’s what I was intending to do, but I felt that it was a shame that you would do all of that and not get anything, not get any qualification at the end of it. So there’s that, and then a lot of people go and do PhD’s and you don’t need to do a master’s for a PhD is what I recently found out. I thought that it was a straight line, but that’s what a lot of people do. And then actually a lot of people are going, that I know are going into pharmaceuticals. So, there is a quite a, you can make that step, the skills that you learn within research midwifery can translate quite directly over to a pharmaceutical company.

So I’ve been offered a Band 7 team lead at the other hospital, the one with all the staff in the big offices [laughs], so that’s to manage a team of Band 6 research nurses in clinical trial offices.

So I should still be doing some of what I do now. I’m going to keep my stroke patients that are in follow-up and do that as part of that clinical thing. Because you build up a relationship with them. And so, and then- but stroke actually isn’t-, is only at the centre I’m at now, it’s not at the centre I’m going to.

So I will be involved in other specialities. A lot of overseeing. And a lot of supporting staff with study set-up. And managing staff really, which I haven’t done before, and all the annual leave and sickness and all that stuff that my line manager now does. Appraisals. And I have to do the nursey bits because the other Band 7 isn’t a nurse by background. So I have to do all the revalidation thing.

It’ll be interesting. And I’ll be taking part in a lot of the more managing, management meetings. Which we’re not privy to at the minute, so. Well I’ve already been to one. So it’s interesting. It’s interesting to see where- well, the pressures they’re under [laughs]. And that’s why the work filters down to my level.

I would say I’m quite an ambitious person, but equally I’m very much a nurse, and I will always be a nurse at my heart and my core. So it’ll always be a job in nursing. But what I love is service innovation and research. That’s why I’m doing my PhD at the moment. And I would like to see that coupled in a clinical-academic role, so an area where I am bedside, patient-facing but perhaps leading a team, looking at service improvement, and I could do all that as a research nurse. So I could work three or four days a week running my own clinical trials and then be helping, you know, six hours a week set up academic studies, collaborating with studies, and looking at service and improvement, service improvement. I think it ultimately as any health professional, not just a nurse, you always need to be asking the question, How can we do this better? And being a research nurse and being somebody who can be involved in that process is a good way of answering that question. Cos you are looking at trying to do things better.

I think I do feel that I’ve got more to give in my career but I’m not sure what that’s going to be yet. I don’t have any imminent plans to leave research. I love what I do. I think I work for a great organisation, I feel very cared for and looked after I think there’s great opportunity, I think there’s always new things coming up, I think I do, have realised that I like setting up new things, so when I came into working with palliative care and setting all the stuff up with the hospices, which wasn’t necessarily as much my nursing side, more a facilitation role, I’ve really enjoyed that helping other people to be able to do this, and I can’t do all of that on my own, but seeing that actually multiply that up by all these people, it’s really good. And the same with my care home work, I’ve been able to do those same sort of things. So, whether I think there might be some opportunity to work with other research naive areas, so I think that’s something that I’m quite interested in, so possibly doing more work with maybe schools, or with prisons. Areas that perhaps research doesn’t go on quite so much in but is equally valid areas for people to do it. Apart from that I’m not really sure. I feel that I want to do more, but I haven’t quite got a handle on what that is, but I’m not in a rush to find it because I’m enjoying what I’m doing right here, right now.

One of the things that I’d quite like to do is pick up a few bank shifts and do, go back and do a few clinical shifts just to, just to sort of keep my skills up. So, I mean you do, it’s not the same as working in a clinical environment, you know, I mean I still, there’s, you know, you’ve still got that patient contact, you’re still doing, you know, taking blood samples and all those kind of things, observations and various, but it’s, you know, it is different, most definitely, you know, they’ve, the desk time is different and you know, and all the paperwork is, there’s much more but yeah I would, would, I will go, I have been planning to do it for a while but I’m definitely going to go back and do some clinical shifts and sort of see how I get on.

I will be a nurse researcher [laughs], that is the key and I will probably I want to be very involved with the patients and go and talk directly to the patient and take their ideas of what is important for them in terms of research and put it onto a, into research projects. So to have absolutely, you know, to get it from the horse’s mouth if you want.

Know exactly what is of importance to them. It’s very nice when you go and you have all these panels and you decide you know, you do all this daily surveys and all the nurses decide what is good for the patients but have we really asked what the patients want? Because we, we probably fall into the, the medics trap, they do tend to do things-, I’m not saying they’re not important for the patient but they do it from their perspective. And now we as nurses, we go and do it from our perspective but what do we do from the patient perspective?

And that’s where I’m, that’s where I’m quite keen on patient experience and patient-, their say.

So for example my day today has been a lot of work preparing work for conference submission, so very, we’re very careful to scrutinise all the work that goes in. So we’re very careful first of all to encourage our nursing and allied health staff on ITU to submit work for conferences, to share what we’re doing. Paediatric intensive care is quite a small community and especially in terms of units that have over ten patients, ten beds. And so actually we all need to learn from each other. And so we have a very strong approach on our unit to support people to put work in for conferences and to also write it up for publication. That side of it needs a bit more work, but the public-, the conference presentations we do really well at. And we have lots of really high-quality work and we make sure that when it’s written up it’s also conducted to a high standard. So a big part of my job is helping people to do that, so I spent four hours yesterday reviewing posters [laughs] but it’s a worthwhile investment because actually staff very quickly pick up those skills and then the next time they come to do a piece of work, actually it’s a lot easier. It’s a much better standard, so it’s takes less investment in the long run.

Yeah, I think that-, given that I believe that the best questions come from clinical staff, I think if you work in research as somebody who is newly qualified, you haven’t got a lot of clinical yards under your belt. And it’s good that you understand all the research process to work on a few trials, you know, they, even when they’re doing that they work an afternoon a week on, you know, or you know probably the equivalent of a day clinically. But there’s a point if they’re going to develop their careers so that they are not unemployable in the wider NHS, where you can stay too long in a research post, and you become so narrow that it is very hard, so if you moved, you know, to a different town you would really struggle to get a, a post. So, I think it’s you know as an employer you’ve got a duty to guide their career in total, and for the newly qualifieds yes, a year, 18 months in research, but then they do need to get their clinical skills up. Yeah hopefully come back or go into a hybrid role.

I’m halfway through a fellowship. And so that’s funded for me personally to work on a project that I designed, that incorporates a number of different studies. So some of those I’ve completed already. One I’m partway through. And then the next stage will be to develop a complex intervention that I’ll be looking to do some acceptability and feasibility testing, towards the end of my fellowship. It’s a doctoral fellowship as well, so it’s my PhD project so I’m writing up a thesis as I go along as well. So there’ll be that to submit at the end of my fellowship as well.

But it’s a matter really of looking for how to progress some of that work, but also my own research career from here, using that opportunity I’ve been given really as a sort of springboard to new opportunities. So I’ll be looking to develop a postdoctoral fellowship application and perhaps to do some individual projects, research projects, to help develop some of the work I’ve already done. To eventually hopefully have a sort of independent research career, so to lead this sort of programme of research that’s sort of built on my own work.

It has actually been an evolution of the role, I think that’s because I’ve had very supportive managers who’ve seen the need to grow and develop the role. The job description itself we’ve changed so during that period of time, I should say, for eight years of it, I’ve been doing a PhD part-time as well, so that impacted on it because during that time you’re obviously becoming a chief investigator of your own study. But it’s also, it’s, we re-did, about 18 months ago we re-did the job description to reflect where I wanted the job to go and where, where the unit needed the job to go. And actually now it’s re-badged from being Research Sister’ to Nurse Researcher’, not with any increase in pay and not re-banded in anyway, but just the focus of the job description changed so it’s much more now about moving from that delivery to being an independent researcher, developing the research culture, supporting other staff, education about what research role could involve, you know, what does good research look like, and actually a lot more of an emphasis on public and patient engagement.

I would like to be someone doing my own research. And so that’s-, I’m kind of banging on my drum about that because I-, I’ve always felt that, but then I’ve been sort of stumbled by how difficult that could be in practical terms, because as I said, I can’t-, I can’t just do a PhD because I fancy it and I’m independently wealthy and that’s what I’m going to do for five years. I need it to be through an awarded really well supported process. So, there are those amazing awards, like the NIHR [National Institute for Health Research] doctorate one. But the doctorate application probably takes a year to do the application and to have a really good supportive team around you. But then, just a few months ago there was the announcement of a new award, which is a pre-doctorate award, which is investing in people’s time to get to be able to submit a competitive PhD application. So, it essentially buys out your time and sets you-, and you-, you submit an application where you’ve set up some supervisory relationships and a bespoke training package for yourself. And then if the lucky people who are awarded this would have a couple of day-, perhaps a couple of days a week, or 50% of their working time, to devote to the development of their own research pathway as a clinical academic.

And that’s what I want to do.

But what I’m trying to kind of negotiate is to be able to kind of create a research element to those posts, and certainly in the Mental Health Trusts that’s more possible. It’s harder in a hospice because it’s the way that the funding works is different. Although, although there is a big kind of movement of research active hospices, so if there, if there was ever a time for me to do it, it’s now. And certainly, I’ve had a lot of interest from the hospice movement in my research, and Hospice UK have a head of research now who’s, you know, looking at sort of capacity building and what have you. So yeah, it’s, I think it’s possible, but it’s not, it wasn’t part of my post. I’ve had to kind of create it [laugh].

And if you want to keep a clinical and an academic role going, that’s harder than just going into the university. You know, that’s the, the pull already is to just go into the university full-time but then you lose that contact with clinical which sort of defeats the object of doing it in the first place. Or just going back to work and back into practice, and then you lose the contact with the university. So I’m just trying to sort of work out how I, you know, how I proceed post-doctorally really.

I know what I would like to do, how I actually go about making that happen is a different matter. I would like to carry on down the clinical-academic type route I think. The, the experience I’ve had, the contacts I’m making, the-, I think I can-, I’d like to think I can use that to make a difference going forward. I’d like to think having a foot in the ambulance service and a foot in academia allows me to link up people, put people in touch, make things happen, help studies get through, develop more research and also bring more sort of-. Research isn’t for everybody and it’s certainly not, not every paramedic [laugh] is going to be interested and not every paramedic is going to see it as a career like I’m trying to do, but there is people out there who would like to go down that and hopefully I can ease the path for them a little bit and let them learn from the mistakes and the time that I’ve had.

And, you know, help them develop the ideas that they have got. So I’d like to see myself continue going down this route, but that relies on finding a role within the ambulance service and a research or academic role that I can combine to make that happen. And that’s something I’m exploring at the minute.

So this goes back I think to what I was saying about having that pathway set up, there isn’t necessarily a clear pathway set up for you to integrate clinical work and research work. So, it’s interesting to think about why, you know how, everybody who I know is a researcher and a clinician has sort of cobbled together something and found their way and uses their skills and enjoys using their clinical skills, whether it be within delivering a clinical intervention, whether it be in supporting students to train, or informing research methods so that they’re appropriate for people with communication needs. Yeah, it’s, there’s no clear cut path and it, it can be a bit of a, a challenge to identify how you fit in it I suppose.

But also- the big RCT’s that I’ve been involved in, the big studies that has sort of brought me to the position and that have taught me a lot, have all been led by academic emergency medicine doctors or stroke doctors or critical care doctors, you know, academic physicians that have seen opportunities to develop research, and often take from the hospital setting and take the pre-hospital setting, and they’ve mentored people like myself, they’ve developed people like myself. But within the paramedic profession, we have a few senior clinical-, sort of clinical academics that have the, the contacts, the knowledge, the background to do that, but they are very few and far between. And that makes it difficult, so in terms of support we’re, we tend to look outside of our own profession to get people to develop us, and I certainly wouldn’t be doing what I was- what I’m doing now if people hadn’t taken me [laugh] under their wing and sort of helped me and guided me and looked after me to get me to this point. But as things are changing, as we do develop our own academics and our own clinicians and our own research experience, hopefully then we can sort of help the next generation of researchers to come through and sort of set the path and help them and guide them.

So yeah, the but the blog post that I wrote, particularly about clinical academic careers obviously really resonated with a lot of people who had read it within Twitter, and I got lots of comments and retweets, and I think that led onto other people reading it and commenting and retweeting, and the essence of the blog was that there aren’t really clear clinical academic careers for speech and language therapists. There aren’t that many examples where people can do both research and clinical practice within one role. I can understand why they aren’t skills that necessarily sit well together, as I said earlier, you know, clinical practice is maybe much more reactive, academic practice is maybe much more reflective, you need slightly different thinking skills, and you-, a clinical academic career for me would definitely require protected research time and protected clinical time, rather than something that embodied doing both at the same time.

But yeah there are obviously lots of other people felt very similarly they were interested in doing research, they were interested in being involved in research activity and in developing a research career but were kind of reluctant to step away from clinical practice. And that’s in essence, where this idea of developing a sort of support network came from. The idea of well if we can capture examples of good practice, if we can learn from each other’s experience, if people are developing clinical academic careers in different parts of the country or developing networks then, you know, maybe we can use the momentum behind that blog post and this Twitter conversation to really start to influence strategy, and to build some really practical sort of, some real practical framework and infrastructure stuff that will help people going forward, then that would be great.

In talking about why I choose to do chose say, a research way of moving up in my career, rather than a management one is, something that has always been so absolutely important to me in, in nursing midwifery, whatever is actually, empowering people, you know, yes, we can go in and we can be benevolent providers of care and supervision and, and, and take quite a parental role. But that’s, you know, that’s very old fashioned and that just isn’t that way anymore. And you, you need to and it was particularly acute in midwifery. You need to empower people, women particularly, families, young couples, whoever they are and say to them, you’re going to be good at what you want to do here. And, you know, you can do this. And it’s just, and, and even that’s what research is all about too. Yeah, so. And get you to do that in research and you don’t maybe get to do that so much if you’re going to worry about management and budgets and things like that.