Mona Grey Lecture: “Making the value of nursing evident” – the role of research evidence and ratios

And yet across the UK there are instances of insufficiency. Despite being the profession that the public trust the most, we continue to not have enough nurses in our health care systems – why is that? Does society really understand the value of nursing and nurses?

One of the UK's leading academic and workforce policy experts, Prof Jane Ball (FRCN), discusses the international evidence on nurse staffing and prompts reflection: what would it take to make the value of nursing evident to everybody? Jane brings her own unique perspective to the topic of valuing nursing - as researcher for 30 years, an avid campaigner for safe staffing and as the incoming director of the RCN’s Institute for Nursing Excellence. 

Jane’s research has focussed on nursing employment and deployment, looking at how features of nurse staffing impact on care quality, patient outcomes and nurses themselves. The unifying aim of the many studies she has led has been to identify conditions needed to allow nurses to deliver excellent care and have satisfying and sustainable careers. 

She has worked at the Institute for Employment Studies, as Policy Adviser at the RCN, and as Deputy Director of the National Nursing Research Unit (King’s College London). For the past ten years she has been based at the University of Southampton. She was made a Fellow of the RCN in 2019.

In July she will become Director of the RCN’s Institute for Nursing Excellence.