Volume 69 (2021): Issue 3 (August 2021)

This paper offers a multi-perspective approach on the role of engaged research in health and social care. Each of the authors focuses on their individual experiences of this domain, from the perspective of an academic partner of the Health Research Board’s PPI Ignite programme, a CEO of an umbrella organisation for health research charities and a researcher in design innovation, focusing on health research. The paper outlines the values which underpin public and patient involvement, as well as examples of its application as engaged research. It details how organisations like Health Research Charities Ireland support and enable engaged research within health and social research and policy. This paper offers a framework for facilitating dialogue and response across all stakeholders in the engaged research process, illustrating the importance of engaged research and how we can further our understanding and application of it within health and social care policy by adopting a design-led approach. We argue that a design-led approach can both facilitate engaged research as well as support policymakers in the design of new policies and practices.

This paper argues that professional regulatory frameworks are shaped by sociocultural factors and prevailing ideologies that stem from society’s interactions with and expectations of the regulated professions. Taking a century of Irish nursing and midwifery regulation as a case reflection, the paper highlights five regulatory pivot points to provide a historical narrative of how adopting a sociocultural perspective can enlighten our understanding of the current regulatory form. A form that in early twenty-first-century Ireland resulted in the establishment of a professionally contentious, non-professional (lay) majority on the regulatory board for these frontline professions. The paper concludes by suggesting that when viewed through a sociocultural lens, regulatory change is to be expected. As prevailing ideologies change, power, influence and cultures alter to support and reinforce the new ideology. Professional regulation thereby becomes reflective of society’s views on professionalism and professional identity, drawing on society’s historical experiences of the professions.

This paper analyses gender and pay in Revenue, one of the largest public sector employers in the state, and identifies a mean gender pay gap of 16 per cent. Once the civil service grade, working patterns, the type of pay scale, the point on pay scale, and the level of non-basic pay are considered, the gender pay gap is eliminated. When decomposed using the Blinder-Oaxaca method, approximately three-quarters of the gender pay gap is due to grade differences, while approximately one-quarter is due to working patterns. None of the gap is explained by men earning a higher return for the same observed characteristics as women. In other words, unequal pay caused by direct gender discrimination does not play any role in the observed pay gap. Given that gender imbalance across grades is the dominant explanation for the pay gap, and may itself reflect indirect gender discrimination, the paper concludes with policy recommendations to support the advancement of female employees to higher grades and to monitor the equality outcomes from flexible work practices in the post-pandemic labour market.