LAUSR

The concept of ‘patient-centred care’ is now central to NHS policy discourse. The acceptance of the ‘how’ of nursing and healthcare delivery, rather than just the ‘what’ of care, represents an explicit focus on addressing the long-debated concerns around both the relevance to and the impact of service delivery models on patient outcome. That the practitioner should be able to develop a compassionate relationship and empathic competence in order to execute their role is now well recognised, and forms the basis of many tried and tested nursing theories. This turn, or as some might proffer, re-turn, to compassionate and empathic competence in the delivery of technical and technological expertise has implications for approaches to research and inquiry for healthcare professionals and, specifically, nurses. Research is intimately linked with achieving excellence that leads to knowledge production. Knowledge production, in turn, is an entrepreneurial activity and one that is now explicitly aligned with the economy of many Western countries (see e.g. UUK, 2014; National Innovation Science Agenda [NISA], 2016). Thus, a further turn in the provision of evidence-based nursing care relates to the nature of nursing research itself, which many academics and clinicians now see as a business in and of itself (Freshwater, 2012; Freshwater and Fisher, 2014). Nursing research is, in essence, both a marker of quality and excellence of the outcomes of research and innovation (knowledge generation) and a means of generating international impact through knowledge production and translation (Freshwater, 2014). Concomitantly, there has been an exciting expansion, inclusion and integration of a broad range of approaches to nursing research. This, along with an increasing emphasis on crossand interdisciplinary collaboration over recent decades, means that mixed methods research (MMR) has grown and continues to grow in its popularity with clinicians, academics and funding bodies alike. Previously competing paradigms of MMR have now themselves become more reciprocal, less boundaried and less differentiated. The three most dominant and easily recognisable