Extracts from this essay...

Introduction

P1: Explain the purpose and role of research for the health and social care sectors. Research is an intellectual investigation to get a greater knowledge or understanding of events, behaviours and theories. Research is very active and systematic process of inquiry aimed at revising, discovering and interpreting facts and also for law establishment and theories. Many organisations have research as an essential tool, though it is exceptional in the health and social care industry. Research in health and social care is for: * Demographic. Prior to planning the delivery of services. Establishing population patterns and statistics. * Epidemiology. Exploring patterns of disease. * Quality assurance. Feedback from service user about service. * Hypothesis. Exploring theories. * Knowledge. To extend understanding of theories * Reviewing and monitoring changes in practice. When health and social care practitioners are planning a new service they need to do research which focuses on the demographic data such as: population size, age, gender etc. This is so the practitioners can predict and plan for the future.

Middle

Reviewing and monitoring allows practitioners to monitor if they are actually achieving what is attended. For example Sure Start has a lot of programmes for mothers and toddlers and they want to also provide activities for fathers and toddlers, as they think fathers are not attending because they assume its only mothers who attend these with their siblings. So they introduce the programme set for fathers and toddlers, they will have to monitor the numbers attending and this will come to the conclusion of how successful it will become. When a researcher identifies a research area and decided on a research question, he/she must then work out the best method of conducting the research. In order to discover information about the society, they're a wide range of research techniques social scientists have developed. Information researcher's use can be divided into primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are data collected by the researcher first hand. Information that hasn't already been collected, the researcher actually goes out and engages in the research.

Conclusion

The 1972 Briggs report was the watershed. Throughout, the need for a sound research base for nursing and midwifery practice was clear in such statements as "nursing should become a research-based profession". Most practicing nurses simply did not know what this meant as the nursing curriculum at that point made no reference to research and virtually no nursing research existed. It also said "research-mindedness should be fostered during pre-registration education", but no nurse educators had the appropriate preparation to do this. "Research should begin in the ward itself or at field level in the community" was another statement. Previously, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, what research did exist was about nurses, their attrition rates, their appropriate roles, predictors of success or failure as recruitment strategies and other matters of interest to researchers from other disciplines who conducted these studies. It was not about nursing practice. The comment, "Too little research is at present carried out by nurses and midwives themselves", was not surprising because only a tiny proportion of nurses had the academic preparation to fit them to conduct research. Reference Alexander M. and Hunt J. (1996) Nursing figures for the patients [Online], Available: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=92081&sectioncode=26 [10 Dec 2008]