Debra Evans

Dr Debra Evans has been a university lecturer in 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 clinical randomised controlled trial (RCT) and quantitative systematic reviews (SRs) for the Cochrane Collaboration. These pieces of research were trying to determine whether a particular health care intervention worked better than another in the area of wound care.

These experiences, alongside the evidence surrounding how best to teach about research methodology, and feedback from her nursing and healthcare students, were invaluable for her own development as a teacher of research. These factors influenced her later design and delivery of core Evidence Based Practice (EBP), Research methods and Dissertation modules, when she was tasked with re-designing this across Faculty Master's level provision.

Being a passionate 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 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.

Her experience has been that many excellent motivated students do not always look forward to, and sometimes worry about, studying research and EBP. She wanted to use her background, and research and teaching experiences, to write a straightforward, engaging, to the point book on EBP - that might help simplify the concepts and help more students achieve their learning and practice goals.