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Nursing to medical research

Dnama

Member
Hi All,

Does anyone know what I would need to do in order to go into medical research after having completed an undergrad in nursing?

Thanks a lot!
 

DrDrLMG!

Resident Medical Officer
Administrator
Hi All,

Does anyone know what I would need to do in order to go into medical research after having completed an undergrad in nursing?

Thanks a lot!

As in, you want to move into a BMedRes degree, or you’d like to do honours/masters/PhD after you finish nursing? If the latter, then your best bet is to speak to your nursing degree teaching staff and have a look at what postgraduate options your university offers.

If the former, then you’d just apply along with everyone else and the university would likely use your GPA to determine your eligibility (this could vary slightly from Uni to Uni).

ETA: I just looked at UTAS offerings as an example and you can do either Clinical Honours or Research Honours in Nursing here, so your Uni (assuming you’re not at UTAS) probably has similar options. And after honours, you could apply to do a Masters or PhD if you wanted to get further into research or academia or make a career out of it, for example.
 

chinaski

Regular Member
Depends on the kind of capacity you'd like to work in medical research. The stated ambition "to go into medical research" is nebulous - can you clarify further?
 

Dnama

Member
Thanks a lot LMG! I am thinking of the masters/phd route because I have got the feeling that I would still need masters/PhD with BMedRes anyway to do med research.
Also If I use my nursing undergrad to get into masters/phd do I have to have the masters/phd in nursing or can it be in a different medical related field? I really appreciate your help :)
 

Dnama

Member
Depends on the kind of capacity you'd like to work in medical research. The stated ambition "to go into medical research" is nebulous - can you clarify further?

Hey! I am thinking of this kind of research (below)
 

chinaski

Regular Member
You don't seem to understand my question. There are many roles that can be fulfilled in medical research - large clinical trials, for instance, involve the input of hundreds of people who all do different jobs within that trial. What role do you envisage playing in medical research?
 

Dnama

Member
You don't seem to understand my question. There are many roles that can be fulfilled in medical research - large clinical trials, for instance, involve the input of hundreds of people who all do different jobs within that trial. What role do you envisage playing in medical research?
Sorry I don’t really know of roles.
 

chinaski

Regular Member
Okay, so you say you want to "go into medical research", which suggests you envisage at least one role. What do you imagine you would do in medical research? What job would you do?
 

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Cathay

🚂Train Driver🚆
Emeritus Staff
Hahaha I just figured. So I am thinking things like trying to find causes and treatments of diseases or improve treatment of diseases, improve understanding of a disease.
Hmmmm. I believe that is the goal of medical research in general.

Let me put an analogy to this: someone says "I wanna go into the railways", your next question will be "so what exactly do you want to do in the railways... What do you want to be... a train driver, a train guard, a shunter in the freight yard, a container loader, a rail vehicle mechanic, a track worker, a train controller, a ticketing office clerk, a booking clerk, an infrastructure engineer... or...?"
 

chinaski

Regular Member
Do you see yourself working in a laboratory, or in a hospital? It seems you really don't know what "medical research" actually entails. Suggest you do a bit of reading around the internet: first, Google what the difference is between "clinical research", "translational research" and "preclinical research". Then, as an educational exercise, try to imagine how those three branches of research might contribute to the discovery of a cause of an illness or the improvement of its management. Then, imagine what kind of people and roles might exist in each of those branches.
 

Dnama

Member
Do you see yourself working in a laboratory, or in a hospital? It seems you really don't know what "medical research" actually entails. Suggest you do a bit of reading around the internet: first, Google what the difference is between "clinical research", "translational research" and "preclinical research". Then, as an educational exercise, try to imagine how those three branches of research might contribute to the discovery of a cause of an illness or the improvement of its management. Then, imagine what kind of people and roles might exist in each of those branches.
In a lab, I would pick pre clinical, since I imagine that would involve me trying to determine the cause and treatment of functional neurological disorder. Sorry guys I really appreciate your efforts to help, I am very ignorant with regards to this.
 

Dnama

Member
And then the treatment would be implemented in clinical research which I would also like to take part in as the one who implements the treatment and studies its effectiveness.
 

chinaski

Regular Member
Are you aware of how feasible that ambition is? What you're essentially describing is a clinician researcher: someone with laboratory credentials and authority, who works with the pre-clinical development of a theory, and then sees it to fruition into a clinical trial which tests the hypotheses generated in the lab. That represents only a very small handful of doctors in this country. Be aware that the vast majority never reach that pinnacle of achievement. Hypothetically, in reference to your original question, to be a clinician researcher as described, you are looking at completion of a medical degree, completion of post-medical training, plus a PhD, plus extra post-doctoral fellowship years before you'd even be considered competitive in those circles.
 

Dnama

Member
Are you aware of how feasible that ambition is? What you're essentially describing is a clinician researcher: someone with laboratory credentials and authority, who works with the pre-clinical development of a theory, and then sees it to fruition into a clinical trial which tests the hypotheses generated in the lab. That represents only a very small handful of doctors in this country. Be aware that the vast majority never reach that pinnacle of achievement. Hypothetically, in reference to your original question, to be a clinician researcher as described, you are looking at completion of a medical degree, plus a PhD, plus extra post-doctoral fellowship years before you'd even be considered competitive in those circles.
To be honest I am not really sure of how hard that would be but I guess that doesn't make it impossible. So is a medical degree MD/MBBS or it can be BMedRes?
 

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chinaski

Regular Member
To be honest I am not really sure of how hard that would be but I guess that doesn't make it impossible. So is a medical degree MD/MBBS or it can be BMedRes?

Medical degree, then specialty training after graduation, plus a full PhD, plus post-doc fellowship. That's bare minimum to be even considered a contender. Not impossible, but be aware that this represents a small fraction of very, very dedicated and gifted people.
 

Cathay

🚂Train Driver🚆
Emeritus Staff
Okay, slight issue here - research has gotten a lot more... multi-people... in the last few decades. It is virtually impossible nowadays for one person to see something through from start to finish like in centuries gone by. With the ever-expanding pool of collective knowledge, actual cutting edge research tends to be very specialized and each researcher focused on a narrow range of topics; clinical trials in particular tend to be done by collaborative multidisciplinary groups nowadays, rather than an individual.

I'm overstepping my pool of knowledge a bit here (I have no formal background in research) but there are different levels to working in the research field. Are you definitely set on being a researcher? This means being the brains behind the projects - coming up with ideas and arranging to make it happen (to name a few steps I became aware of through my medical education: study conception, study design, seeking funding, getting ethics approval, arranging all logistics/supplies to enable data collection, followed by data analysis incl statistical analysis, making sense of it all, writing a coherent and meaningful paper, being impactful enough to get published, etc.) - note that going down this path will require, as chinaski said, a medical degree, specialty training, PhD, post-doctoral fellowship years etc. (Something like 15-20 years of hard work to get in the door with this path.)

On the other hand, would you be looking at nursing in research, rather than research in nursing/medicine? There are jobs for nurses on clinical trials, working at the coal face with patients (and assessing patients as part of data collection), like this listing here (found it via quick googling) for Registered Nurses in the Clinical Trials Unit with MidCentral DHB in Palmerston North. This particular career path doesn't require higher qualifications beyond nursing, and is essentially an extension of a nursing career; but of course if you were looking for the fame and prestige of discovering something and having it named after you, this path probably won't achieve that. (I don't think they really do new medical eponyms anymore, anyways - these days there's a preference towards more descriptive names, rather than calling something Cathay's disease.)
 

Dnama

Member
Medical degree, then specialty training after graduation, plus a full PhD, plus post-doc fellowship. That's bare minimum to be even considered a contender. Not impossible, but be aware that this represents a small fraction of very, very dedicated and gifted people.
Ok thanks you!
 

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