The Team

The RCN Foundation is a charity which provides support to the nursing community in order to bring about public benefit. In the period covering April to December 2013 it spent £122,000 providing direct financial support to members of the nursing community in need and £180,000 on bursaries and scholarships. In 2013, the trustees of the Foundation re-examined the structure of the project grants programme and decided to research how best further money could be spent. The University of York has been funded to work in partnership with the charity as the first step in developing a new grants programme focused on supporting projects that will help deliver benefits to patients through nursing in care homes.

Emeritus Professor Tony Butterworth CBE is a Trustee of the RCN Foundation and Chair of its Benevolent Committee. He is also Chair of the Foundation of Nursing Studies and a visiting Professor to the University of Maribor in Slovenia and to the Waterford Institute in Ireland. He registered as a mental health and general nurse and has been a Professor, Dean and Pro-Vice Chancellor in the Higher Education Sector as well as an NHS Chief Executive. He was most recently Chair of the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and has a long and distinguished history in research, innovation and educational development.



Dinah Cox OBE is the first Head of the RCN Foundation, having started in March 2013. Currently she also chairs the BBC Children in Need London and South East Committee and sits as a trustee of the Wembley National Stadium Trust. She studied social policy at South Bank University and the London School of Economics and has over twenty years’ experience in working to influence, develop and fund social change. This has included paid and trustee work, charity work, overseeing local community projects, working on equality issues and employment in organisations focused on providing services for homeless individuals. She also worked for the Labour and Coalition Governments as a Senior Policy Advisor.

The Department of Health Sciences at the University of York has an established track record in nurse education, evidence based nursing and research outputs addressing nursing policy and practice concerns. The research team have a portfolio of work focusing on nursing workforce, skill mix and care homes and experience of working together on a number of successful collaborative projects. 



Professor Karen Spilsbury who is Principal Investigator for this study.  She is a registered nurse and health services researcher. Her portfolio of research concentrates on important clinical and policy problems in the areas of healthcare workforce and its impact on service delivery and care across a range of settings, including care homes.  Karen is involved in supporting nursing students at York:  she is Programme Lead for the integrated undergraduate Masters in Nursing and is a module leader and personal supervisor for the BSc (Hons) Nursing.

Dr Barbara Hanratty is senior lecturer and honorary consultant in public health. She spends one day each week working as a GP. Her research is concerned with older adults’ health, including end of life care. Patient and caregiver experiences and the influence of socioeconomic disadvantage are particular interests. Recent work has included studies of older adults’ transitions between settings and living alone with cancer at the end of life. She is now developing a programme of research that aims to ensure that care home residents receive high quality primary care.

Dorothy McCaughan completed an undergraduate degree in English at Queen’s University in Belfast before moving to York and training as a registered nurse, after which she worked abroad for 10 years.  Dorothy has worked on a range of research projects within the Department of Health Sciences, including projects on nurses’ use of research information in clinical decision making and patient involvement in patient safety. Dorothy's research interests are in skill mix in healthcare delivery; new nursing roles; evidence-based practice; patient safety; and qualitative methods.  She is also involved in departmental teaching activities.