Professor Jane E Ball RGN, BSc (Hons) PhD
Professor of Nursing Workforce Policy

Jane has been researching nurse staffing and workforce policy since 1990. A major interest is nurse staffing levels and the interface between research evidence and policy development.
Researching nursing workforce and the delivery of fundamental care
She started her nursing career with a nursing degree from University of Surrey. Several years later she took a up a research position in the psychology department at Surrey before joining the research team at the Institute of Employment Studies in Brighton, to research nursing workforce – role boundaries, roistering, staffing levels & skill-mix, and the motivation and morale of health service employees.
Much of her work has involved large-scale surveys of nurses’ employment and deployment, to explore the relationship between staffing and outcomes. In 1997 she co-authored the WHO’s guide to staffing and skill-mix, and whilst working as a Policy Adviser at the RCN in 2010 wrote the UK guidance on ‘Safe Nurse Staffing’. After working as Deputy Director of the National Nursing Research Unit, at King’s College London she moved to University of Southampton in 2014. She continues to research nurse staffing and skill-mix issues, and the impact on the delivery of fundamental care and patient outcomes. Working as part of the NIHR CLAHRC Wessex, she led work to determine what staff, patients and the public see as the research priorities to improve fundamental care on hospital wards. The results of a formal priority setting exercise placed nurse staffing high on the list of priorities.
Working as part of the Health Workforce Research Group, she is contributing to several studies which explore the impact of variation in nurse staffing levels in more depth (such as the ‘Missed Care Study’, and the ‘SNCT study’).
With funding from the Department of Health’s Policy Research Programme, she is currently leading a two-year study of the implementation of safe staffing policies in England, following the Francis Inquiry.