The Northern Mental Health Nursing Qualitative Research Forum meets three times a year to connect Mental Health Nurse researcher interested in, and conducting, qualitative research, methodologies and innovations. If you wish to be added to the mailing list, please contact KMWright1@uclan.ac.uk.
The following session was recorded at their second event on Thursday 13 October 2022. With thanks to Prof Karen Wright and Dr James Turner for organising the event and the invitation to support with recording the sessions.
Title: What are the drivers and influencers of pursuing career choices within the nursing and pharmacy fields and does this change once in practice?
Author: Rumbi Mbondiya
Charles and Ewbank (2021) outline that even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the greatest challenge faced by the health care industry was workforce crisis. Presently, the effects on recruitment and retention of health care personnel post pandemic are showing a significantly increased risk of severe staff shortages (The Kings Fund,2021). To address short- an20d long-term labour shortages, concrete steps must be taken. This will require a competitive salary, flexible work options, and more defined career paths, particularly with a great emphasis laid on retention efforts for those at the beginning and end of their careers, as well as on shortage groups and specialties (Charles & Ewbank, 2021). This research focuses on nursing and pharmacy specialities.
In view of the above, contributing towards informing better strategies to address recruitment and retention within the healthcare industry by exploring extensively the motivators behind pursuing a career in healthcare is cardinal. Henceforth, the author has chosen to undertake a longitudinal study about what motivates students to choose a profession in nursing and pharmacy. Therefore, following them up 1 year later into their first year of practice as a Health Care Professional to see if anything has changed would be deemed necessary to achieve an effective outcome which tackles the latter. This forms the author’s research question highlighted below: “What are the drivers and influencers of pursuing career choices within the nursing and pharmacy fields and does this change once in practice?” A longitudinal study comparing the UK and USA with the view to apply better strategies to tackle recruitment and retention within the healthcare workforce industry.
A mixed methods approach will be used for this longitudinal study by the order of a qualitative phenomenological approach initially to provide a comprehensive description of an individual's lived experience with a phenomenon and to facilitate the documentation and description of the scant information now available. This will be followed by a quantitative data collection which will be beneficial in establishing the study's objective.
