Research and refresh
By RCM Research Advisers Jude Field and Jenny Cunningham on 20 December 2021
As we get to the end of the year, there’s often a sense of getting things finished and preparing for new beginnings in the new year. If you’re looking to develop your career further, there are some great opportunities available to secure funding to help you do so.
The Jean Davies Award, Iolanthe Midwifery Trust opened on 1 December, with the deadline for applications on 1 Feb 2022. This amazing award is jointly funded by the RCM, and applicants must be either a student or individual RCM member. Projects can be research, care and service improvement work, or a mixture of both, and can be funded up to a maximum of £5000 - with the stated aim to reduce or to investigate inequalities. We are very grateful to Tomasina Stacey, 2020 winner, for offering to be a point of contact for anyone interested in applying this year - [email protected]. The Iolanthe 'Midwives Award', 'Dora Opoku Award' and the Midwifery Research Fellowship are also now open for applications.
If you are thinking of applying for funding towards post-registration education, such as diplomas, post-graduate degrees, and PhDs, you may want to look at the Nightingale Fund. The charity awards grants three times a year, and the current application deadline is 16 January 2022.
If you’ve got some time over Christmas, why not brush up on some of your knowledge? As well as the full range of iLearn topics, available for free via the RCM website, Cochrane Learning Live have a great archive of free pre-recorded webinars. You can also access the ongoing Qualitative Evidence Synthesis (QES): Learning Live webinar series, with the next webinar being held on 20 January 2022.
Looking a little further ahead, The RCM’s Education and Research conference will be held at the Coventry Arena on Wednesday 23 and Thursday 24 March. This will be the RCM’s first in person conference for two years and it will be wonderful to get together, to share research ideas and experiences. We want this to be a really interactive and engaging conference - and already have some brilliant sessions confirmed, more of which in the new year.
The abstract deadline is the 16 January so there is still time to submit. The RCM ilearn module 'Spreading the word - getting your abstract accepted' may provide you with some helpful hints. Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, for an oral presentation, a poster, or – new for this year – a pre-recorded ‘elevator pitch’. Your elevator pitch will be a concise jargon-free description of your project that explains your key messages in just 3 minutes. This is a more informal way to explain your proposal or study succinctly to colleagues for conferences and networking.
Just like 2020 before it, 2021 has proved a challenging one – but for many of us, it’s also helped us re-evaluate what’s important to us and our work. So, if that includes research, please do tap into the growing resources we have on the RCM’s Research Hub.