Since 2010, we’ve awarded £3,809,000 million in research and innovation grants, funding 79 projects.
We’ve collaborated with other organisations such as SameYou, The King’s Fund and Beyond Words. We’ve created the UK’s first Chair in Adult Social Care Nursing and invested in nursing students in Bangladesh.
Improving patient care, health and wellbeing
By 2028, we will have developed a new grant funding programme on greener practice and sustainability in nursing and midwifery. We will ensure that our research includes funding opportunities for quality improvement projects, and that these are available to all parts of the nursing and midwifery workforce, as well as establishing a programme to develop a pathway for early career researchers. Additionally, we aim to develop a new grant funding programme focused on issues of midwifery and maternal health to target the key issues from both a workforce and clinical practice perspective.
Partnerships
Research and innovation drive excellence in the delivery of care and clinical practice, improving patient outcomes and experiences, and creating healthier communities. Over the last 15 years, we’ve partnered with organisations and universities to deliver ground-breaking, long-lasting research that have made a real impact within nursing and midwifery.
Chair in Adult Social Care Nursing
In 2023, we announced our investment of over £700,000 to create the UK’s first Chair in Adult Social Care Nursing (CASCN), a significant step towards shaping the future of teaching, research and professional practice in adult social care.
In 2024, we announced that Professor Claire Pryor was appointed the the RCN Foundation CASCN and will be hosted by the University of Salford. On her appointment, Claire said “There is an absolute need to ensure our nurses working in social care settings are recognised, supported, and developed throughout their careers. We need to work toward recognition of social care nurses as a highly skilled, autonomous clinicians, and empower them to use specialist and advanced skills, leading and shaping high quality care across the sector.”
This role will bridge the gap between research and clinical practice and is fundamental to improving care delivery and the recruitment and retention of nurses in this field.
Learning Disability Nursing Programme
In 2024, we announced our learning disability nursing grant-making programme Inclusive Health – enhancing the lives of individuals with learning disabilities. This will be delivered over a four-year period at a cost of around £360,000.
There are a multitude of factors affecting individuals with a learning disability and learning disability nurses, including premature deaths, significant health inequalities and limited workforce capacity. In order to address these health and care challenges, we are funding a number of research and education projects to support the needs and outcomes of people living with a learning disability and the nursing staff who support them. The aim of the programme is to enable RNLDs to reduce health inequality and enhance health related quality of life outcomes for people with lived experience of a learning disability.
Funding has been awarded to organisations such as London School of Economics and Political Science and universities including Edinburgh Napier University and University of Wolverhampton.
Neurological rehabilitation
In 2018, we began working in partnership with brain injury charity, SameYou, founded by actress Emilia Clarke and her family. We implemented a programme of research and education designed to meet identify and meet the needs of young adults with an Acquired Brain Injury (ABI).
Since then, we’ve supported the award-winning Young Adult Rehabilitation Network Scheme (YARNS) study by the University of Edinburgh which mapped the lived experience of neurological rehabilitation for patients aged 18 to 40 following a brain injury. We also developed, funded and supported with the delivery of the UK’s first-ever Postgraduate Certificate in Neurological Rehabilitation and Care at the University of Edinburgh. The course is designed to help nurses respond more effectively to the effects of neurological conditions – a leading cause of death and long-term disability in the UK.
Children and young people's mental health
In 2022, we launched a three-year programme to support nursing-led interventions that improve care for children and young people’s mental health and emotional wellbeing and support the nursing staff who support them.
We have funded a series of projects and research initiatives including the development of an online toolkit of resources that will support non mental health nurses and midwives to better support mental health and wellbeing among children and young people. Central to the toolkit is an app which will support nurses and midwives to assess children and young people’s mental health as well as directing them to the next stages of support and care.
We also partnered with The Leathersellers' Foundation to provide education grants to non-specialist nurses pursuing postgraduate qualifications to support children and young people’s mental health care.
Covid-19
During the pandemic, we responded by not only creating our subsidiary charity, Covid-19 Healthcare Support Appeal (CHSA), but we also funded a number of dedicated projects designed to meet the emerging needs of nursing and midwifery workers as they responded to the pandemic.
We awarded over £48,000 to the Institute of Health Visiting (iHV) to develop a programme to promote emotional wellbeing at work for small groups of health visitors that were working in the community during the pandemic. We also funded a project lead by The University of Hertfordshire to create and evaluate a visual resource to help people with intellectual and learning disabilities give their consent to having the COVID-19 vaccine. In 2021, we provided funding to Queen Margaret University to explore nurses’ and midwives’ experience of leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, to underpin what leadership strategies and interventions were effective during the crisis.