Nurses and Midwives Key to Health Systems Improvement

In low-income countries, particularly in rural areas, nurses and midwives carry out an extremely high proportion of healthcare and treatment. Yet although the fields of health systems literature and research continue to expand, significant gaps remain. In particular, these include research by nurses and on nursing-led health system strengthening, and support for nurse leadership of research and treatment.

To help tackle this, in June The Open University and the University of Edinburgh held a very successful two-day workshop, 'Embedding Empowerment of Nurses and Midwives in Health Systems Research and Improvement', on the OU's Milton Keynes campus. Taking as its starting point that currently there is far too little work undertaken on nursing and midwifery in health systems, and that nursing research and nurse leadership could help fill this gap, the workshop brought together colleagues from Tanzania and Malawi with nursing researchers from the UK and Spain to discuss ways of strengthening the knowledge, authority and leadership of nurses and midwives in improving African – and other – health systems.

As well as presenting and critically discussing outlines of papers on nursing research in health systems, in preparation for a special issue in a peer-reviewed nursing journal, participants worked on a proposal for a seed-funding bid and established a core working group to prepare a large consortium or collaborative proposal in the near future.