Ann Wakefield

Overview

Ann''s current roles include
Professor of Nursing Education

Biography

Ann qualified as a general nurse in 1982 and as mental health nurse in 1984; She has worked as a nurse educator since 1987 first as a clinical teacher and then as a lecturer at the University College Chester. She moved to Manchester as a Lecturer in 1998 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2005 and Professor in 2012. Ann was subsequently recognised as a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy 2017.

Ann completed an MSc in Practitioner Research in 1992 when she examined nurses'' knowledge, skills and attitudes to pain and pain management using a mixed methods approach. She completed her PhD part-time at Manchester in the Department of Sociology examining the Organisation of Surgical Nursing Work from an Ethnomethodological stance. This study highlighted the role and function of taken for granted work practices engaged in by nurses within general surgical wards. From this analysis, Ann highlighted how nurses manage their work whilst simultaneously dealing with day-to-day organisational troubles.

Ann has also undertaken a series of interprofessional learning projects bringing together nursing, midwifery, medical, medical science, geography and education students to work on interprofessional learning units of study. She has also been engaged in examining the impact of a blended face-to-face and e-learning approach to the teaching of Root Cause Analysis Techniques to qualified practitioners. In addition, she was invited to become a research advisory group member for a study looking at Student Nurses Perceptions of HCA’s funded by the Burdett Nursing Trust. Ann is also worked as a consultant on projects funded as part of the Service Delivery, Organisation Research and Development Programme under the auspices of the Department of Health looking at the impact of Assistant Practitioners in acute NHS trusts and later exploring the development of the assistant workforce with community based settings.

Ann''s latest work is focused on developing a MOOC related to Research in the Real World: Health and Social Care, alongside a team of colleagues drawn from across the Division and which is designed to target school leavers choosing a profession as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students alike to enable them to appreciate what it is like to be a researcher and the challenges they face in getting research off the ground.

In addition, Ann is also been part of a national team of educational facilitators who have helped to train NHS Research Ethics Committee Members how to review social science research studies and she regularly facilitates introduction to research ethics processes for new and established researchers, as well as research governance and pharma representatives to enable them to navigate the research ethics process more effectively on behalf of the HRA.