Hello <<First Name>>,

Well it is coming up to my sixth anniversary of trading as Ruthless Research, and all continues to go well!

Journal article

I'm ever so pleased that my long-term clients at NHS Education for Scotland have had an article published in the Evidence Based Midwifery Journal based on their project and my evaluation of it. And I am a co-author!  This is exciting for me, because as a Consultant I don't often get to 'publish' my work in the traditional sense, or even speak about it publicly, because the findings are 'owned' by my clients and are generally intended for internal use. 

This one is in the public domain though.  The Best Start Leadership Programme was an innovative leadership development programme which over the course of the last four years has provided hundreds of Midwives and Looked After Children's Nurses in Scotland with a structured course of leadership education, support and development via:

• Attendance at national educational and networking events;
• Initiation, development and evaluation of local quality improvement projects;
• Participation in 1:1 telephone coaching from experienced leadership consultants.

It has been an absolute privilege working on Best Start as project evaluator these last four years, because NHS Education for Scotland has been 100% committed to learning from the evaluation and using it to enhance their offering.  Their project has gone from strength to strength, and response to it has only got better over time, as a result of this.  In 2014/15 and 2015/16, 100% of responding Participants said that they were satisfied with the administration of the programme, and higher levels of satisfaction led to better outcomes for Participants, for the NHS, and for patients. Seeing my work make a real difference has been a genuine pleasure for me.

So, the article is called The Development, Implementation and Evaluation of a leadership programme for midwives and if you are a subscriber to Evidence Based Midwifery you can read it here.

If you're not a subscriber (no? me either!) you can read more information on the Best Start project here.

Top blogs

I've been blogging on the subject of research for much of the last six years and I've had a really good response to my posts.  

I thought you might be interested to know which posts have generated the most interest over time... drum roll please...

1. Incentives: Maximising research participation by giving people stuff
2. Screener questions: Keeping out the riffraff
3. Cold calls and telephone research - scam or no scam?
4. How posh would you say you are on a scale of 1 to 10?
5. Sugging, frugging, and other ways to write a bad questionnaire

Why not check them out?

And while you're there, don't forget about my two-part e-book series:

1. The Ruthless Research guide to commissioning and managing research projects
2. The Ruthless Research guide to interviewing external researchers

If there's any burning question that you have about anything even tenuously related to research, do drop me a line and I'll blog about it!

Hello lovely clients

Finally, a big hello to my current and recent clients: NHS Education for Scotland, Arts & Business Scotland, Scottish Recovery Network, and Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema. And another one in the pipeline - fingers crossed and watch this space!


Well that’s all from me for now.
 
Keep in touch!  I'm online at: website, blog, twitter, linkedin.