Dr Debra Evans
Dr Debra Evans has been a university lecturer in the Faculty of Health Education and Life Sciences for 28 years.
She trained as a Registered Nurse (RGN), has a quantitative scientific background from studying a PhD and Degree in Physiology, and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy [SFHEA]).
Whilst working as a young lecturer she completed courses on clinical trials, systematic reviews and statistics to enrich her understanding of research methods. She put this learning into practice being part of teams undertaking a randomised controlled trial (RCT) and quantitative systematic reviews (SRs) for the Cochrane Collaboration. These pieces of research were trying to determine whether particular health care devices worked better than others in wound care.
These experiences, alongside the evidence surrounding how best to teach the subject of research, and feedback from her nursing and healthcare students and colleagues, were invaluable for her own development as a teacher of research. These factors influenced her later design and delivery of core level 7 Evidence Based Practice (EBP), Research methods and MSc Dissertation modules when she was tasked with re-designing this across Faculty provision. These were successfully validated to be part of the PG Framework so any existing/future Health MSc courses could utilise these to ensure an equitable PG research education provision.
Being a determined advocate of EBP, she has spent the best part of her career trying to demystify research, especially the quantitative aspects, for her students. It has brought great job satisfaction successfully supervising over a hundred MSc Dissertation students undertaking primary research or systematic reviews to help inform their practice. Even more so helping both under- and post-graduate students, especially if they struggled with the topic, to make sense of EBP, to be able to read research critically, and to pass their research assignments and MSc Dissertations.
Her experience has been that many excellent motivated students sometimes worry about studying research and EBP. She has used her background, and research and teaching experiences, to write a book on “Making sense of EBP – an introduction to quantitative and qualitative research and systematic reviews” which was published by Routledge in 2023 and is available as an eBook and physical copy in BCU library. It was her hope that it might help simplify research concepts and help more students achieve their learning and practice goals whilst studying their Research methods, EBP and Dissertation modules.
She continues to enjoy teaching and supervising students about research and EBP and has recently joined the Pedagogical Innovations Community at BCU to keep abreast of developments in teaching.