“When I saw the advert I thought: ‘Yes, great, I’ve been waiting for this,” said Lesley Lowes, who is a month into her new position as the Florence Nightingale Foundation chair of clinical nursing practice research at Cardiff University. “I’ve really enjoyed my career, and I think this is probably the pinnacle of it.”

The new position was devised by Cardiff University and Cardiff and Vale University Health Board in partnership with the Florence Nightingale Foundation. Professor Lowes, formerly reader in paediatric diabetes nursing at Cardiff, said that when she saw the expectations of the job – including those of the three organisations involved – she felt she fitted.

“I was delighted [to be appointed] because nursing and nursing research have always been a passion of mine,” she said. “Very early on [in my nursing career], I began evidence-based practice and [considering] how we can take nursing research forward. I think this role is about being an ambassador for nursing research and trying to improve patient care by doing and using research on the wards and out in the community.”

Professor Lowes started in nursing “quite late”, she said. After qualifying as a general nurse, she moved to Cardiff and Vale because she “only wanted to work with children”, and the place where she trained would not give her a paediatric post.

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Although her one reservation in applying for the current role was having to leave clinical practice, which she had been combining with her academic work since 1999, she believed that it “was exactly the right decision”.

Along with “all the academic activity that you would expect a professor to carry out”, one of the job’s main roles would be to “lead on the development of a nursing research strategy for Cardiff and Vale” and to help nurses to make a difference.

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“It’s about being there for them: being a mentor, a resource, a presence in nursing research,” she said. “Already I’ve had nurses say, ‘Can I come and talk to you? I’ve got this [research] idea.’

“I want to raise the profile of nursing research because nurses have had a very bad press recently. Nurses do a lot of good work. They’re caring, they’re committed to their patients and they are interested in evidence-based practice [to improve care].”

Therefore, she was keen to “develop nurse researchers and the clinical academic pathways for nursing”, which “aren’t very clear” at the moment.

“There aren’t many nurses who are in clinical practice and who are academic[s]. It’s quite a difficult road to travel,” she said. “Nurses are very busy, their clinical roles take precedence, and I think a lot of them may see nursing research as an elitist activity.

“But I believe that if you ask any one of them, ‘is there an area of your practice that you would like to have more evidence on?’ they [will have] research questions [arising] from their practice.”

john.elmes@tsleducation.com