The nurses attitudes to nursing research are described in Table 3. The majority took the view that nursing research, the building and use of nursing theories as well as university-level education were important to the development of nursing practice now and in the future. Two-thirds (65%) also agreed with the statement that‘‘Nursing science is important to me personally’’, and three-quarters (77%) were interested in following the latest trends in development in the discipline. Nonetheless,over one-half (55%) felt that nursing science had remained distant to themselves, and almost half (48%) said that research in this field is completely detached from the practice of nursing. Likewise, almost half (45%) took the view that research results rarely did little more than state the obvious that they would have known anyway. Two-fifths (41%) felt that the results reported had no real impact on the practice of nursing. The same proportion (40%) said that medical knowledge was more important to them than nursing knowledge. Only just over one-third (38%) regarded doing research as an important part of the nurse’s job. The mean value of the summary variable (n ¼ 15) was 2.84 (minimum 1.12, maximum 4.00, range 2.85, s.d. 0.59 and 95% confidence interval 2.78–2.90), i.e. the nurses took a fairly positive attitude to nursing research from their own practical vantage-point.