The Health and Social Care Workforce Sustainability and Development Research Group has a focus on high quality research into understanding and evaluating health and social care professions education and training.
There are two main research areas:
- the current and future workforce, including recruitment and retention across the continuum from undergraduate to postgraduate, to ensure workforce sustainability
- professional skills development across the continuum from undergraduate to postgraduate and continuing
We are a multi-professional group of researchers with expertise in health and social care workforce education and training research across medicine, nursing, allied health professions and social care. Our aim is to provide and support high quality research in response to important and practical challenges, with our findings informing change in practice and policy but also future research.
Our research can contribute to the health needs of society by enhancing the education and training of all health and social care professionals (undergraduate and postgraduate) and the organisations within which they work and learn. The research is aligned to current NHS and societal priorities, including the NIHR Clinical Education Research Incubator. We can achieve this contribution through our extensive local, national and international networks and collaborators.
Our health and social care professions education and training expertise can also add value to many clinical research projects in which there is a professional training component. We can provide advice on the design and delivery of evidence-based and innovative interventions, and also frameworks for evaluation that consider transfer of training to practice.
We are passionate about developing researchers who are new to this field and we have a track-record of supervising a variety of health and social care students and professionals with projects in education and training, including MSc, MRes and PhD.
An important aspect of our work is supporting the development of educational scholarship and evidence-based teaching and learning, in which the challenges of day to day teaching and training prompt further inquiry to inform change in practice.