Challenges of delivering Australian research honours programmes for healthcare professions

ABSTRACT

The Australian honours research degree plays an important role as a pre-requisite for direct entry into doctoral research programmes. The honours degree training is particularly important to health disciplines where there is a growing recognition of the importance of research training to embed evidence-based approaches to practice. This study explored current availability and uptake, delivery features and resourcing of the Australian health honours research training model. It used a pragmatic, explanatory, sequential mixed methods design to examine the characteristics of 227 programmes with data collected by webpage extraction, survey, and semi-structured interviews. The perspectives of academic leads were sought on the challenges of delivering these programmes. The programmes have diverse structures but all consist of a supervised research project with accompanying coursework. Our findings suggest that (a) provision of such research training could be simplified by being uncoupled from the structure of undergraduate programmes; (b) interest in these programmes is strongest and resourcing most supported when these programmes are integrated within established research programmes; and (c) students should be supported throughout to develop autonomy and understand feedback. These findings offer insights into the delivery of research training for health disciplines and can inform research development and training policy across settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Research training
• undergraduates
• research education
• evidence-based practice
• research experience

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge and thank Katie Green for her assistance with web extraction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).