Research projects in community nursing care of the elderly

Concern has been expressed about the lack of research taking place in community nursing. There are difficulties in monitoring who does what; some of the difficulties are to do with defining research and deciding whether a research project involving nurses in the data collection is a nursing project or not. Nursing research projects sponsored by DHSS have been well documented as have projects specifically concerned with children. There are anomalies in funding the community based research and nursing research in particular. To gain some idea of the kinds of funding and research in community nursing in relation to the elderly, a national survey was carried out by this research centre over 1986 and 1987.