Fiddling while Rome burns? Conducting research with healthcare staff when the NHS is in crisis
Journal of Health Organization and Management
ISSN: 1477-7266
Article publication date: 30 January 2020
Issue publication date: 6 March 2020
Abstract
Purpose
Health research in the UK is being impeded by a stretched NHS system. The purpose of this paper is to use the Great Fire of Rome as an allegory to understand the difficulties encountered by health researchers when attempting to conduct research within a healthcare system that is currently in crisis.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on both the authors’ own and other research teams’ experiences from the published literature in order to demonstrate that this difficulty is a widespread problem for the health research community in the UK.
Findings
Recruitment and engagement issues across different research studies and clinical environments are often ascribed as being related to individual contexts or settings. Rather, the authors propose that these problems are actually writ large across nearly the entire NHS. The authors offer ideas for what can be done to alleviate the worst of this situation – a change in culture and ways of working alongside employing more pragmatic, rapid methods to engage exceptionally busy healthcare staff.
Originality/value
The paper offers a provocative viewpoint that instead of seeking to individualise recruitment and engagement issues in relation to the local context, the research community should publicly acknowledge the universality of this problem in order to bring about meaningful change.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This paper was written whilst Laura Sheard was a writing resident at the Brocher Foundation (http://www.brocher.ch) in Switzerland. Sincere thanks go to the Brocher Foundation for hosting the writing of this paper. LS and RP conceived the initial idea for the paper together. LS then wrote the first draft and revised subsequent drafts. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript. The authors would like to thank Claire Marsh for her useful and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also to a wider group of colleagues who read a previous draft of the paper and put forward suggestions for revisions, during a meeting in March 2018. The views and opinions expressed therein are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of their wider research team members, Health Services and Delivery Research Programme, CLAHRC Yorkshire and Humber, NHS or the Department of Health.
Citation
Sheard, L. and Peacock, R. (2020), "Fiddling while Rome burns? Conducting research with healthcare staff when the NHS is in crisis", Journal of Health Organization and Management, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 77-84. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHOM-04-2019-0105
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited