Nursing Research aims to advance our understanding of the way that nurses can better support people during illness and to achieve healthy lives. Nursing research is key to improving population health, as nurses are the largest professional group in the NHS and provide the majority of care.
We do this in two ways:
- Research projects aimed at improving people’s lives
- Research to ensure that we are preparing nurses as well as we can for the future.
Streams of work include improving our knowledge of health and illness and how these can best be managed, tackling inequalities and ensuring health care is directed to improve equity of access, improving the way that we utilise medicines and undertaking pedagogical research – the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Our Nursing Research Highlights
As a leading UK Nursing Department we ensure that our students are at the cutting edge of nursing research. Our research primarily focusses on improving patient care and nursing practice. We explore issues of inequality in health, cancer survivorship, menopause and vaginal health. We aim to ensure that those from disadvantaged and marginalised groups have improved access to health care and healthier life styles.
Understanding and management of health and illness
Our programme of research, led by Professor Deborah Fenlon, explores issues surrounding cancer survivorship, such as menopause, lymphoedema and vaginal health, and how these can be managed through nurse-led interventions, self-management and clinical interventions. We start with the patient and what they are experiencing, the problems they want help with, and explore and test ways to help people deal with these problems and maximise their health.
Tackling Health Inequalities
Professor Louise Condon leads a research theme exploring the health of disadvantaged and marginalised people, with the aim of identifying ways to improve access to health services and facilitate healthier lifestyles. Current projects focus on the mental and physical health of Gypsies and Travellers, and on the services health visitors provide to maintain children’s wellbeing. These build on existing work on the health challenges experienced by Black and Minority Ethnic groups, and child health promotion.
Tackling inequalities in health – Deaf mental health research
Dr Julia Terry leads a new network group which has been set up to find out more about Deaf people’s mental health. Did you know that about 40% of Deaf people have mental health problems?
Medicines Management
Medicines management is essential for any holistic consideration of health and wellbeing, and is also an important aspect of health services delivery (an NIHR theme). Medicines management relies on interdisciplinary co-operation between nursing, health and social policy, medicine, pharmacy, and pharmacology. Like all successful groups, some of our publications explore research methods to develop the rigour of the discipline.
We are an inter-disciplinary group with an intervention whose impact will address the current WHO global patient safety challenge and the unsustainable level of hospital admissions (5-8%) caused by adverse drug reactions.
Nursing Pedagogical Research
Nursing at Swansea University is the largest provider of pre-registration nurse education in Wales. We very successful and are listed second in the UK for nursing in the Guardian University Guide (2019). In 2019 Nursing at Swansea University won the Nurse Education Provider of the Year (Pre-registration) title in the Student Nursing Times Awards.
