Ella

Ella has been a research nurse for about 5 years. She originally trained and worked as a nurse in Africa, specialising in midwifery and intensive care nursing. Studying has always been important to Ella, and she says it became a “learned habit” to alternate working for a few years and then undertake a qualification. She moved to the UK to start a Master’s course and, after completing this, worked as a midwife. She undertook another Master’s degree and then worked in health visiting. It was whilst Ella was a health visitor that she saw a leaflet advertising a research job. Ella remembered thinking this was interesting and applied for the role. After several years as a research nurse, Ella went back to health visiting briefly. She returned to research nursing and has since been working on a number of projects. 

Ella is currently working on several studies. The one she is most involved in is looking at the impact of elderly care home residents taking probiotics. Her role includes identifying potential participants for the study, arranging consent (often with the families of the care home residents), and taking various samples at the start and throughout the duration of the study. Ella finds that doing research with elderly participants has some challenges but says that it is also rewarding to work with this group of people. For example, she finds that some of the participants are very lonely and so the research appointments are an opportunity for them to talk and feel listened to. Ella says it is important to have good working relationships with the care home staff as they can help with aspects of the study such as collecting stool samples from study participants with incontinence. In some of the previous research studies, she was involved in vaccinations and taking blood pressure measurements.

Ella enjoys her job and the current project she is working on. However, there have been occasions when the workload has been too high and not enough time has been factored in for her to see all the study participants allocated for that day. She finds the job often involves a lot of travelling, which can be tiring. Ella likes knowing that her work can benefit people in the future, by adding to the knowledge about the best options available in health care. She describes research nurses as “the engines” that drive research data collection, but she doesn’t feel that this contribution is always recognised by others or valued as much as it should be. For example, she finds that the results of studies are often published without listing the research nurses as co-authors or acknowledging all their hard work. She hopes this will change in the future and thinks that there could be more scope for research nurses to be trained in data analysis too.

Ella plans to continue as a research nurse. Initially she was put off by the posts often being short-term but she now feels more comfortable about contract renewals. She encourages other nurses to consider trying research nursing at some point in their careers because it can be very rewarding.