Research

Our nursing and midwifery research is rated as well above world standard^{^} and is conducted through our Centre for Quality and Patient Safety (QPS). With strong partnerships with major Victorian healthcare providers, QPS is uniquely positioned within academic and healthcare environments to identify and rapidly respond to emerging complex care and patient safety issues.

Study a research degree with us

Whatever your research focus, we have an expert supervisor for you. Academics within the School of Nursing and Midwifery and clinical experts within our hospital partnerships are available to support your research project. Our honours, masters and PhD students have access to a diverse range of hospitals and healthcare agencies due to our well-established partnership network.

Find out how to become a research degree student at Deakin

Our vision at QPS, which is embedded in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, is to be a world-leader in applied health service research, with a focus on knowledge translation in relation to clinical care, quality and patient safety.

National and international collaborations

QPS enjoys productive and extensive collaborations with researchers around the world, including nursing, medicine, pharmacy psychology, epidemiology, health economics and biostatistics.

Our research spans public and private healthcare sectors in urban, regional and rural areas. Researchers lead a range of interrelated programs, which are organised into three main areas:

• patient experience
• patient safety
• health workforce.

Projects within these areas interface with the eight National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) standards aimed at driving implementation of safety and quality systems and improving the quality of health care.

Find out more about QPS

At the School of Nursing and Midwifery we've created the first fully-coordinated partnership of its kind in the world: the Clinical Partnership Network. It connects us with six major Victorian health services to facilitate and apply multidisciplinary, multi-site research:

No other research cluster has the immediacy of access to a clinical point of care in health services that QPS researchers enjoy. The relationships demonstrate a deep commitment by industry to nursing and midwifery research.

This commitment translates to the co-funding of multiple ‘research only’ positions. Our partners could not provide this level of funding support if they did not receive considerable benefit in terms of workforce development, capacity building and improvement in the quality and safety of the care delivered to patients through research, research training and translation of evidence to practice.

Learn more about our health service partnerships on the QPS website