NIHR ARC East Midlands – ‘Lunch & Learn’ Training Series

ARC EM Lunch & Learn Training Programme
Professor Natalie Armstrong, our ARC East Midlands Implementation Lead, presents a training session giving an overview of qualitative methods. By the end of this session, you should be able to:
• outline some basic principles of qualitative research;
• be aware of the diversity of methods;
• describe some of the different qualitative approaches to study design and data collection; and
• understand some of the challenges involved in collecting and analysing qualitative data.

#ARCLunchandLearn series is hosted by NIHR ARC East Midlands.

Making change happen isn’t always straightforward. A range of theories and models have been developed to help implement change. However, these will usually need to be modified or adapted to meet the challenges found in real-world settings. Looking at previous efforts to implement evidence-based innovations can help us learn lessons from success (and failure). The purpose of this session is to help participants think about how they can achieve effective implementation, which can produce meaningful impact.

Part of the ARC East Midlands "Lunch & Learn" 2024 training series.

Delivered by Professor Carolyn Tarrant, this webinar provides an introduction and overview of the thematic analysis approach for analysing qualitative data

Thematic analysis is a widely used and accessible approach to analysing all forms of qualitative data. This talk will introduce thematic analysis and compare it to other forms of qualitative analysis. I will discuss the nature of themes, and outline the six key steps in generating themes and writing up thematic analysis findings. I will also consider the importance of reflexivity in thematic analysis.

Part of ARC East Midlands' Lunch & Learn training series, in this webinar, Dr Julie Bayley, Director of Research Impact Development at the University of Lincoln, shares her expertise and advice about being impact literate in your research.

Impact can be most simply defined as the ‘provable benefits of research in the real world’, and is an increasingly core part of the research landscape. For research to make a difference in the world – have impact – we need to shift beyond dissemination and into more active engagement with society. We also often need to provide coherent plans for impact at the funding stage, and demonstrate (prove) the changes our research has had later in the research lifecycle. Drawing on the principles of impact literacy (Bayley and Phipps, 2017, 2019), this session will cover what impact is (and isn’t), how it can be planned in, ways in which is can be generated and how it might be measured.

In this session of our lunch and learn series on implementation & impact, Dr Kristian Hudson, Implementation Specialist from NIHR Yorkshire & Humber Applied Research Collaboration, joins us to talk about implementing for impact: garnering a more realistic approach to implementation research in healthcare.

Despite our best efforts, research findings have not been great at telling us how to sustain and upscale evidence-based interventions in healthcare. There are always a few factors that prevent long-term sustainment and widescale scale-up. Kiss-of-death variables such as financial constraints, time restrictions, and an increasingly complex healthcare system can all make implementation difficult.

In this session, Kristian describes some essential implementation research approaches that allow us to deal with complexity and these challenging contextual factors. He uses use real-world case studies to demonstrate how we can carry out transformative implementation research that achieves impact.

Kristian’s podcast, Essential Implementation, can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZu-S0m8tgInP9p6yOcuB-A

Presented by Professor Nicola Mackintosh from the University of Leicester, this session introduces focus groups as a qualitative research method and explain what constitutes good practice in relation to the conduct of focus group studies.
We will assess the value of focus groups in terms of collecting data and consider a range of practical, ethical and methodological issues arising when using focus groups in a health or social care context.

Justin’s research examines the implementation of strategic change in healthcare systems and the impact of change on the work, culture and identity of healthcare professionals.

Health and care leaders are constantly looking for and experimenting with new ways of organising and delivering care, often in the context of growing demand, staffing shortages and resource constraints. This can result in lots of promising innovations that help improve service organisation and delivery, but questions often remain about how effective and safe these innovations are, and whether other service providers should take them up. In these situations, there is a need for rapid evaluation to provide time-critical evidence and learning.

In this session, Justin Waring will introduce the principles of rapid evaluation and explain some of the approaches currently being used by the NIHR Birmingham RAND and Cambridge (BRACE) Evaluation Centre.

Substantial input from patients and public members is regarded as a compulsory element in any NIHR research grant application process. However, many clinicians and researchers do not have an opportunity to learn: a) why meaningful and not tokenistic PPI involvement is crucial for their grant application success, and b) how to start meaningful PPI activities within their time/resource limitations.

This session is aimed at a wide range of clinicians and researchers working in health and social services.

In this session, Professor Stephen Timmons from the Centre of Health Innovation, Leadership and Learning at Nottingham University Business School gives an overview of why we use implementation theories and summarises the CFIR and NPT models. Stephen:
- Discusses the nature of theory in social science and how it differs from theory in (natural) science
- Explains two theories in implementation research, the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, and Normalisation Process Theory, how they differ and what they are useful for.
- Talks about how to choose the right theory.

In this session, Dr Neil Chadborn, one of our ARC East Midlands Dementia researchers shares his experience of conducting realist research.

REALIST EVALUATION AND REALIST REVIEW – exploring the mechanisms which underlie interventions or programmes.

There is an art to writing successful funding applications. In this session, Prof Gordon will be reflecting on his experience of writing successful grant applications, how he goes about it, what has worked, what hasn't, and what to avoid doing.

In this session, you will learn about some of the operational aspects of implementation, such as identifying your audience, developing a strong value proposition, and actually knowing what ‘thing’ is resulting from your work.

Informed by implementation science, but probably more akin to product development and marketing, the session will make most sense for individuals / teams who have something (in development or finished) that is implementation ready.

For more resources, please visit: https://arc-em.nihr.ac.uk/our-approach/working-towards-implementation and https://arc-w.nihr.ac.uk/training-and-capacity-building/arc-west-courses/an-nihr-arc-guide-to-resources-about-implementation-knowledge-mobilisation-and-impact/

Disseminating your findings is an important part of the research process. In this session, Dr Alison Cowley (Associate Chief AHP at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust) talks us through a tried and tested structured programme of how to write an academic paper in 6 weeks!

The specific learning objectives are:
1. To take the fear out of writing
2. To explore reasons and motivations behind publishing
3. To identify what publishers what
4. To provide a structured approach to writing an article for publication in six weeks

In this session, Dr Ben Smith, AHP/HCS Clinical Academic Lead at University Hospitals of Derby and Burton shares his experience on conducting a trial.

This workshop will give a brief overview of a clinical trial, through the lens of an example. Learn what preparation work is needed before a trial; clinical trial design terminology; regulation, ethics and safety requirements; who and what’s involved in a trial; plus top tips and pitfalls to avoid.

In this session, we talk about what coproduction is (and what it isn't), why we do it, and how we do it.
We explain the difference between co-production and co-design, and how co-production should be a key part of stakeholder engagement work.
Lots of tools and tips are shared.

To ensure maximum impact, academics need to communicate their research findings clearly and concisely. Become an expert at dissemination and excellent at this key phase in the research cycle.

In this session, learn some tips about how to use social media to disseminate your work.

Using the social media platform to promote your research and demonstrate impact, with handy tips, tricks and all you need know to become a Twitter expert. In this session, we provide an overview of using social media for strategic research purposes.

In this session, we hear from Professor Elizabeth Orton about her real world implementation research programme. Using the case study of FAME, a falls prevention intervention, this recording describes approaches used to influence the spread and adoption of innovations in public health. The session focuses on how theoretical frameworks can be used to describe the mechanisms that underpin implementation and adoption, and inform the development of practical resources to support wider spread.

Note: the FAME video is missing from this recording - it is uploaded as a separate video.

This video is part of our Implementation - Spread and Scale session.

In this session, Professor Adam Gordon shares his experience, expertise and top tips on efficient writing skills and techniques, especially in relation to writing for academic peer reviewed publications and getting published.