SOAR is a research capacity-building programme designed to help Nursing and Health and Social Care Professional staff become more involved in research. The programme brings together practical training, mentoring, research events and opportunities for collaboration. It aims to make research more accessible to staff, build confidence and create a supportive environment in which research can become part of everyday clinical practice. The SOAR feasibility study will examine how the programme works in practice at St Vincent’s University Hospital and whether its activities and evaluation methods are suitable for wider use.
Baseline information on research activity, confidence and barriers is collected across the nursing and HSCP workforce before the first cycle begins, and the same measures are repeated as cycles complete. The evaluation is run by the Cancer Research Programme Office and has been approved by institutional ethics committees.
The study is a mixed-methods feasibility and acceptability evaluation, set at the feasibility stage of the MRC framework and organised using RE-AIM. It has three confirmatory objectives and one exploratory one.
Whether SOAR can be delivered as designed across two cycles, judged on delivery fidelity, attendance and completion.
Whether participants find the programme acceptable, asked separately for each component someone attended rather than as one blended survey.
What proportion of the eligible cancer nursing and HSCP workforce the programme reaches, and how representatively, by role, department and shift pattern.
Whether there is a preliminary, hypothesis-generating signal of change in research capacity and culture, and what might otherwise explain it.
— surveys are separate from taking part in the programme. You do not need to participate in the evaluation to engage with SOAR. The capacity and culture survey goes to the whole eligible workforce, whether or not you attend anything.
— an information sheet and consent step precede each online survey, and completion constitutes consent. Clinic attendees consent on the request form they complete before their session.
— the capacity survey uses a code you generate yourself, so baseline and follow-up can be paired without identifying you. Clinic records carry no detail about who asked.
— the evaluation has been approved by the ethics committee at St Vincent’s University Hospital. Data is held on secure UCD storage, accessible only to the project team.
The study is designed to establish whether SOAR can be delivered as intended, whether staff find it acceptable, and who it reaches. It is not powered to demonstrate that the programme causes a change in research capacity, and no such claim will be made from it.
The capacity and follow-up measures sit alongside two open questions on whether research culture has shifted and what respondents attribute any shift to. These exist to surface other plausible explanations before anything is credited to SOAR.
Results will be submitted to a peer-reviewed publication, so other centres can use what is learned.
Questions about the evaluation, please email crpo@ucd.ie.
STUDY TEAM
Dr Chris Crockford, Principal Investigator
Siobhan Cregan · Dr Linda O’Neill · Dr Margaret Barton-Burke