This weeks’ blog is by Dr Analisa Smythe, Research Matron, Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health trust, The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (analisa.smythe@nhs.net), and Dr Catharine Jenkins, Associate Professor, Dementia Care, Birmingham City University (catharine.jenkins@bcu.ac.uk)

There are lots of reasons to publish your work: To add to the body of knowledge (high-quality, evidence-based nursing), you might want to become a recognised as an expert in your field, publishing your work can help advance your career, your findings might also help improve existing practice and/or policy. We are both nurses and nurse researchers, we have written about our practice and research and feel that nursing excellence is often ‘under the radar’, but sharing it leads to good outcomes for both writers and readers. These are our recommendations.

Preparation

Before publishing check with your Research and Development Department that you have the correct approvals in place, if you are describing your practice, you won’t necessarily need ethical approval. Start by reading around the topic, try to make sure your idea is original and that nobody else has published anything similar. You could ask the librarian to carry out a literature search using key words. There are frameworks which can help you develop a review strategy and find literature which is relevant to your topic. E.g. PICO and PEO.¹ Next you should scope potential journals; try to identify a target journal. Professional journals publish discussion papers, service evaluations, quality improvement, and clinical articles. Choose a journal that you know is read by people in roles like yours. You will have access to the RCNi journals through RCN membership. Look for journals which may have published similar work in the past, ensure the paper fits within the scope of the target journal, check the guidelines, and email the editor if you are unsure. When writing up a quality improvement project you should relate the work to the model or technique you have used. ²

Teamworking

It is much easier to write in a team, collegial writing support can also help with procrastination! Before beginning you should try to develop an outline to organise your thoughts in a logical form, making a clear plan for the article, so you and colleagues can agree on the structure and divide the work between you. This is also a good moment to decide who will be the lead author. Use the outline to organise your thoughts and help with focus. You can use the SQUIRE template, which has been developed for writing up QI projects. ³ Ensure anyone who contributed to the initiative is included – don’t exclude people, give them the option to be included in the writing and if they don’t want to, offer them an acknowledgement. applicable for their needs.

Content

After the initial planning meeting agree who will write what as a first draft, with a date. Agree in advance to be supportive but honest in expressing thoughts about writing, you don’t want to sound disjointed, instead aim for one ‘voice’. The tone of writing needs to be engaging, warm and positive, this usually means writing in the first person rather than the passive voice. So ‘we did this’ rather than ‘this was done’.  It is also best to be succinct, as health care professionals are busy and often just want to read what will be immediately useful to guide changes in their own practice. It is important to write with readers in mind, for example, by keeping focus on what will be most interesting and applicable for their needs. Subtitles are useful for clarifying structure, both for writers and readers. Photos, pictures and diagrams break up text and for some readers make a complicated scenario or dynamic much easier to follow. If using photos, it is important to get permission from any person or organisation featured. Anonymised quotes really bring a story alive, these should be accurately reported and again shared with permission.

It can be tempting, when we are very enthusiastic, to just write about all the good things! But readers need to understand the more difficult aspects too. How you overcame the barriers within your professional context might be the most significant element for someone else addressing a similar problem.

The discussion section is often the hardest to write. State your interpretations and opinions, explain the implications of your findings. Identify your strengths and weaknesses. No paper is perfect, but editing for verb tense, meaning and flow will improve the piece. The main thing is to convey to readers what can be learned. Sometimes bullet points or a small box of key learning outcomes can provide that focus.

Practicalities

Writing alongside a busy job can sometimes become difficult. Despite early excitement, people may not have the stamina! Think about what might get in the way, time and motivation, services and resource, and how to support each other. It can be encouraging to imagine the excitement of seeing your work in print and how reporting on your initiative could influence the practice of other professionals you may never meet.

We look forward to reading your work!

References

1. Davies, A. (2019). Carrying out systematic literature reviews: an introduction. British Journal of Nursing, [online] 28(15), pp.1008–1014. doi:https://doi.org/10.12968/bjon.2019.28.15.1008.
2. The Health Foundation (2021). Quality Improvement Made Simple. [online] The Health Foundation. Available at: https://www.health.org.uk/publications/quality-improvement-made-simple.
3. SQUIRE (2020). SQUIRE | SQUIRE 2.0 Guidelines. [online] www.squire-statement.org. Available at: https://www.squire-statement.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&PageID=471