Professor Bernie Carter delighted to be a Clinical Professor at the University of Tasmania.
Bernie is Professor of Children’s Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire and Director of the Children’s Nursing Research Unit (CNRU), Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing and is delighted to be a Clinical Professor at the University of Tasmania.
Bernie absolutely loves research as it is a good combination of challenge, frustration, fun and problem solving. She believes research is generally good for the soul and more importantly it can help improve the experiences and health outcomes of children and their families.
Bernie’s research is narrative, dialogic, appreciative, collaborative, and arts/activity-based in its approach. She finds that framing teaching and research in an appreciative manner can help reveal stories of success and achievement that provide individuals and organizations/ settings the confidence to explore new avenues of learning, growth and development. Her particular research interests relate to children’s pain, chronic illness, care provision for children with complex health care needs and the role that children’s nurses play in the lives of children, young people and their families. Using narrative approaches means that dissemination can become an active process with participants being able to share their experiences with other people facing similar situations (see for example, the My Child is in Pain web resource which has been developed with parents http://mychildisinpain.org.uk/).
Since 2008 she has been leading the development of the Children’s Nursing Research Unit (CNRU) which is a unique, ambitious, collaborative initiative that aims to celebrate and further establish the distinctive contribution of children’s nursing research. It is a partnership between three HEIs and a Foundation Trust. The CNRU is aiming to create a research community comprised of nursing scholars, clinicians, children and their families and to create opportunities for all members to develop their own skills, knowledge and capacity.
Bernie has published quite extensively (books and articles) and is the Editor for the Journal of Child Health Care, Sage Publications and on a good day with a following wind, she loves writing.
Currently Bernie is collaborating with Dr Karen Ford and colleagues (UTas) and researchers in the UK and New Zealand on researching children’s experiences of chronic illlness. Other on-going activity with UTas include writing papers, writing a book on nursing children and young people and planning future research.
In her free time she loves to ‘relax’ by going rock climbing, walking, mountain biking, cycling knitting and felting (although not usually all at the same time): these activities are good antidotes to research!