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Building on earlier work, this paper describes a coordinated and systematic method for identifying priorities for nursing development within a field of practice. The nursing contribution in stroke care serves as a case study, the primary aim of which was to establish priorities for research and development in stroke care from a nursing perspective. The initiative was a partnership between the Royal College of Nursing and the Stroke Association, supported by the Royal College of Physicians.

The nursing professions' R&D priority-setting Initiative was established to increase the involvement of nurses, midwives and health visitors in research and development activities in the UK. A first phase of work explored the feasibility of establishing a systematic and coordinated process for identifying priorities for R&D for the nursing professions. The second phase aims to build on the collaboration and cooperation achieved in phase one to establish a process and structure to promote a united professional voice for nursing on R&D (Scott et al., 1999). To this end, proposals were developed to establish a strategic alliance of the professional interests which would be known as the Strategic Alliance for Research in Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting. Part of the role of this alliance would be to lobby for funding for research activity in nursing. This paper sets out to investigate the involvement of nurses with the nursing research charities and looks at ways nurses could improve their chances of obtaining funding from such sources.

The aim of this paper is to provide a report of the progress made in the first phase of the national initiative established to identify priorities for R&D for the nursing professions, which was reported earlier in this journal (Kitson et al., 1997). Here we describe how the methods were used, discuss the primary and secondary results achieved in the first phase of the initiative and present an outline of how it is proposed to take these results forward in a second and more strategic phase. The aim of the first phase was to explore the feasibility of establishing a national systematic process for identifying priorities for R&D in the nursing professions*. It is now proposed to establish a strategic alliance for research in nursing, midwifery and health visiting and these proposals are summarised at the end of the paper.

This paper describes a national initiative to establish a co-ordinated and systematic method for identifying priorities for research and development, jointly set up by the Royal College of Nursing and the Centre for Policy in Nursing Research. It uses an explicit policy-making model described by Lomas1 to outline the stages of the project. This model is also used to consider how nursing is influencing the current national clinical effectiveness and research and development agendas. Consideration is given as to whether the priority- setting exercise could make a difference to this wider policy agenda.