Ashley Shield is a nurse specialist at Newcastle Hospitals NHS trust, working in the community with frail older patients.
Last year, Ashley undertook an internship as part of the BRC’s programme for Nurses, Midwives and Allied Health Professionals (AHPs). He completed a six-month research project to determine the best way for nurses to assess nutritional intake in older people and how to encourage patients to make positive changes to their diet.
Although the internship has now ended, Ashley is continuing to work with Professor Miles Witham and Professor Sian Robinson from the AGE Research Group on his findings – to determine how we can support older peoples’ nutrition and their management of chronic long-term conditions.
Here he shares what he’s learned and how he hopes to help his nursing colleagues to improve their patients’ health and wellbeing:
“Nurses are the largest profession in the NHS and the most trusted. They often have the most consistent contact with older people in the community. There is huge potential for improving nutrition in older people with health promotion from nurses. Many older people have much to gain from eating better in managing chronic diseases and living more years disability free.
By the time I completed my nursing degree in 2017 I was very knowledgeable about nutrition, what to eat for health and what to avoid, and knew how to make delicious, nutritious food. But I hadn’t learnt this in my nurse training. Yet every single nursing assessment will include a section on food, on diet, on nutritional intake. I suppose the assumption is, we just know what we should do here because we eat ourselves, and anything more complex we just refer to dietitians.
I am driven by the desire to help nurses improve their patients’ health and wellbeing. Nurses are pragmatic, they want to empower patients with knowledge and skills. I work in the community with frail older patients, so the focus was on this group of patients, however there was so little written about nurses and nutrition in general.
With help from colleagues at the BRC, Prof Sian Robinson and Prof Miles Witham, I put together a short online survey for community-based nurses around nutritional knowledge, attitudes, and practices with older people.
Around 200 nurses completed the survey from across the country – and now we are working out the significance of the results and using these findings as a stepping stone, discussing how we translate this knowledge into practice to improve care."
The internship has been a fantastic opportunity. It has helped to develop research skills in writing, reviewing and thinking about projects. The time and space it gives you to engage with research is very valuable, your confidence in what you are doing improves and networking with others helps build a platform for developing your ideas into reality. Some people might think that research is too complex to do but it’s actually really practical and is about seeing a problem and thinking how can I do something about it. And nurses are well-placed to do that, we do it every day, looking at gaps and where we can improve. So taking this opportunity has been really rewarding.
The internship has been a fantastic opportunity. It has helped to develop research skills in writing, reviewing and thinking about projects. The time and space it gives you to engage with research is very valuable, your confidence in what you are doing improves and networking with others helps build a platform for developing your ideas into reality.
Some people might think that research is too complex to do but it’s actually really practical and is about seeing a problem and thinking how can I do something about it. And nurses are well-placed to do that, we do it every day, looking at gaps and where we can improve. So taking this opportunity has been really rewarding.
Professor Miles Witham said:
“It’s been a real pleasure for us working with Ashley on this project, especially as we are also colleagues within the Newcastle Community Rehabilitation Team. This internship has been a great example of how our BRC research work is informed by clinical practice and clinical need, and has the potential to feed back directly into better care of our patients through these close links between our clinical and research teams."
“It’s been a real pleasure for us working with Ashley on this project, especially as we are also colleagues within the Newcastle Community Rehabilitation Team.
This internship has been a great example of how our BRC research work is informed by clinical practice and clinical need, and has the potential to feed back directly into better care of our patients through these close links between our clinical and research teams."