Affiliations: Director of Training and Research, Brothers of Charity, Borders Region, Scotland
Abstract: The gulf between research and practice in health and social services is uncomfortably wide. Valuable efforts and energies of professional researchers are squandered as the implications fail to empower and encourage practitioners and become more adept at undertaking their own service-based research projects. A model is presented to aid their planning and in aligning the methodologies to suit the resources at their disposal. A guiding maxim is that in services at present, any research is better than none.