Helen Allan Secures Visiting Scholarship at De Montfort University

Helen Allan has secured a Visiting Scholarship to the Centre for Reproduction Research at De Montfort University from January to March 2019. Helen will be working on papers with Professor Nicky Hudson and her team which arise from the Early Parenthood after IVF study. Helen’s collaborators on this study have been Professor Olga van den Akker (MU), Professor Lorraine Culley (DMU), Dr Ginny Mounce (University of Oxford), Jo Killingley, Lindsay Ahmed and Therese Bourne (MU) and Ruth Hudson (Surrey & Borders NHS Trust).

Limbus conference on Toxic Organisations

Limbus is an organisation, based in Totnes, Devon which has organised a series of fascinating conferences on aspects of psychotherapy and its interface with organisations like the UK NHS. A week or two ago I spoke at their event on Toxic organisations and Neoliberalism. It was one of the most enjoyable and stimulating conferences I have been to in very many years, held in the beautiful Dartington Hall.

My topic was the promotion of resilience among nurses in the NHS and the video of the talk is below.

RCN Research Society Facebook page

The RCN Research Society leaps fearlessly into the world of social media with a Facebook page. We have 179 members of the page so it is clearly a good way to reach a lot of researchers in nursing in one fell swoop. Maybe to advertise research jobs or publicise a recent paper or book or to informally canvas opinions of nurse researchers.  Its to be found here.

RCN research society page

Professor Helen Allan to give seminar on infertility, at the Royal College of GPs

Professor Helen Allan has been invited to give a seminar at the Royal College of
General Practitioners on the topic of ‘Infertility’ at an RCGP Learning, One
Day Essential CPD for Primary Care Event on Men’s Health.

This is an important step forward for Professor Allan who hopes to recruit
GPs to work with her on a funded research project about early parenting in
infertile couples and the role of primary care professionals in identifying
the needs of parents following IVF.

For further information please contact Professor Allan: h.allan@mdx.ac.uk 

Professor Helen Allan of CCRNM and colleagues win grant to investigate fertility treatments

Congratulations to Professor Helen Allan of the Centre for Critical Research in Nursing and Midwifery Education and colleagues who will investigate early parenthood experiences of infertile couples after successful fertility treatment as part of winning a development grant award.

The research group, which includes Professor of Health Psychology Olga van den Akker and Professor of Nursing Helen Allan, won the Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology (SRIP) grant award to run a workshop to develop a collaborative team for investigating the implications on IVF/ICSI conception and delivery of a baby for couples’ lives in early parenthood.

Full story here:

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/news/2016/05/researchers-win-grant-to-investigate-fertility-treatments

 

Doctors and Nurses do not need more stress – protect our NHS!

In a recent letter to the Guardian newspaper, signed by prominent nursing academics including Professor Helen Allan from CCRNM,  nurses at all levels are urged to participate in Action Nursing – a movement which encourages nurses and their health colleagues to engage in action to protect health care.

Read the letter in the Guardian

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Professor Helen Allan

Our Sociology book launched at RCN Research Conference

After a year of meeting at secret locations in London we finished our book Understanding Sociology in Nursing with Danny Kelly and Pam Smith, 2016 ISBN: 9781473913592 Available from Wordery or from the publisher Sage. The idea of the book is to do something different to the sociological-theory-for-nurses format. To me (MT) those kinds of books seem to be aimed at other academics rather than student nurses or practitioners. Our book starts with issues that this kind of reader will have to face e.g. becoming a nurse, or when things go wrong and looks at how basic sociological concepts can help make sense of these things. The book was launched by sociologist Julia Lawton.

book cover

Sage launched the book at this year’s RCN International Research Conference in Edinburgh. Here are the authors, attempting symmetry.
author

Early parenthood experiences of infertile couples after successful fertility treatment: SRIP award

Olga van den Akker and helen allan with colleagues at De Montfort (Lorraine Culley) and Dundee (Andrew Symon) and Flinders University in Austraila (Sheryl de Lacey) have won a Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology developmental grant award to run a workshop to develop a collaborative team to investigate the implications of IVF/ICSI conception for couples’ lives in early parenthood.

This topic is under-explored in the literature internationally. Existing research has identified  potential health need but this is ignored by policy makers although acknowledged by service users in the UK. We plan to address this gap in research with our focus on transition to early parenthood for infertile couples, on fatherhood as well as motherhood and on our use of mixed methods as an interdisciplinary team which includes a strong service user perspective. We believe this work has relevance both nationally and internationally.

The Centre’s first visitors

CCRNM were delighted to welcome Associate Professors Nagata and Takemura from the University of Tokyo, Japan. They spent the day with Helen Allan, observing undergraduate teaching, and visited the simulation suite with our departmental colleagues Fiona Suthers and Jose Hernandez-Padilla. They shared a working lunch with CCRNM staff and others (see below). Our hope is to develop links between a new Centre in Nursing Research at the University of Tokyo and CCRNM.

visitors 1

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