The Research Apprenticeship

Aims and Rationale The PHCRED program is an acknowledgement that primary health care (PHC) research is not growing out of academic training in the same manner as other medical research. The program was, therefore, largely designed not to actually fund research but to provide training and support for PHC practitioners to engage or re-engage with academic research. At present, however, there are few opportunities for PHC professionals to embark on the conventional academic researcher development route of a long graduated apprenticeship within experienced research teams, and in our experience, without that opportunity many will not get beyond attending workshops. Approaches Our program has begun to direct a portion of our funding to support small short-term seeding or pilot research projects, led by established researchers, but funded on the strict proviso that the projects employ aspiring or emerging PHC researcher(s) in an ‘apprenticeship’ role. Findings In the two years that this strategy has been running, all our ‘apprentices’ have made the next step towards a research career; two have moved from unsuccessful to successful RDP candidates, one to a PhD candidature and one to an academic appointment with a research component. The research projects themselves also appear to have made the next step towards larger funded projects and the opportunity to provide further apprenticeships. Benefits to the Community Research active practitioners are an essential ingredient in advancing evidence-based primary health care and this requires approaches that ease the practitioner pathway into research involvement.