Evaluación económica financiera del proyecto

Once permission to undertake the study had been granted, the researcher held meetings with the senior nurse managers for all the non-acute medical wards in the targeted hospitals in order to publicise the study and to garner their cooperation and support. This was important because the senior nurse managers help was required to ensure that all the nurses who volunteered to participate in the study were given time from their clinical duties

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to take part in the study. There was a mixed response to the study with some senior nurse managers being more enthusiastic than others.

The senior nurse managers who were enthusiastic about this study invited the researcher to publicise the study in the meetings that they held with their ward managers. As a result of these meetings the researcher was able to visit the nurses who worked on the wards that fell under the remit of these senior nurses to explain the study in more detail and to leave information sheets and consent forms on the wards. Senior nurse managers in 11 out of the 14 hospitals in the target population declined to allow the researcher to approach their staff about taking part in this study. The senior nurses maintained that this was due to the fact that their wards were undergoing a great deal of restructuring, and it would not be possible to facilitate this study at that time. In these cases, the researcher was not able to get

permission to speak to the ward managers or visit the wards and hence was unable to recruit any participants from these wards.

Support from the senior nurse managers was also important to this study because the senior nurses had a key role in ensuring that the participants were given time from their duties to be interviewed. The senior nurse managers also provided the researcher with a room in the hospital that was far away from the ward, so that the researcher could undertake the interview without any interruptions. So, when a senior nurse manager

refused the researcher permission to approach their staff about taking part in this study; the study could not be undertaken in that setting even though permission had been obtained from the Trust that ran these hospitals.

This did not preclude the researcher from directly approaching the nurses and interviewing them in their own time. This would have been challenging because research governance approval for this study was obtained on the proviso that the nurses would not be

interviewed on their own time and that interviews would be undertaken on Trust premises. This study was undertaken at a time when the Trust was restructuring its wards and a lot of nurses were either being reassigned to different ward or re-interviewed for their posts. Therefore, the researcher would have had no way of knowing which nurses worked on each ward and would have been unable to visit the wards, given the fact the permission to visit the wards had been denied.

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So, the researcher felt that it would be inappropriate to attempt to approach nurses directly and ask them to take part in this study in their time. This meant that it was not possible to achieve the objective of recruiting participants from 14 different hospitals out of a

theoretical target population of 300 nurses. It must be noted that these challenges in recruiting participants only affected the first stage of data collection where the participants were recruited from two hospitals. In the second stage of data collection, participants were recruited from the twelve hospitals that had not taken part in the first stage of data

collection.

After the researcher had visited a ward, all the nurses who worked there were given an information sheet explaining fully the aims and objectives of the study. The potential participants were also given a consent form that they were asked to complete and send to the researcher, if they were interested in participating in the study. (The information sheet and consent form can be reviewed in appendices 9 and 10 on pages 256 and 264

respectively.) Once the researcher received a signed consent form, the potential participant was contacted and a pre-interview visit arranged.

Similar arrangements were made for the recruitment of students to this study. The

researcher held meetings with the pre-registration department of the university to publicise the study and gain their support. As the researcher was only interested in speaking to students who had worked on the aforementioned wards, it was not possible to speak to all the students in person as this would have meant the university breaching data protection regulations. Therefore, the researcher gave the information sheets and consent forms to staff working the pre-registration department of the university who forwarded them to students who fell into the target population. Once the researcher received a signed consent form, the potential participant was contacted and a pre-interview visit arranged. The pre- interview visit also afforded the researcher the opportunity to explain the interview procedure and finalise the arrangements for the actual interview two weeks later.

All the potential participants in this study were issued with an information sheet that set out the aims and objectives of the study accompanied by a consent form in order to ensure that they were able to give their informed consent to participate in this study (see appendices 9 and 10 on page 256 and 264 respectively). The potential participants were given two weeks

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to think about participating in the study. Once the participants had consented to

participating in the study and had a pre-interview visit by the researcher, they were given an additional two week cooling off period before being interviewed.

Now that the manner in which informed consent was obtained, it is now appropriate to examine the plan for interviewing the participants in this study.