Allied health professionals and nurses as paramedical research coordinators in French healthcare institutions: a national cross-sectional survey of workforce characteristics, roles and scientific activity (PRC-FR 1)

In the world of modern medicine, the best patient care does not come from intuition alone; it comes from evidence. When doctors, nurses, and other health workers conduct scientific studies, they generate the knowledge that makes treatments safer and more effective. Yet, for decades, the people who deliver this care—nurses and allied health professionals like physiotherapists and radiographers—have often been left out of the research process. They face significant hurdles: they are busy with patient care, they lack dedicated time to write papers, and they often do not have a clear path to becoming researchers themselves. In many countries, the solution has been to create temporary roles or ad-hoc teams to help, but these efforts are often fragmented and short-lived.

France decided to try a different approach. Instead of treating research support as a temporary fix, the country established a permanent, officially recognized job title in 2018 called the Paramedical Research Coordinator. This is a specific career path for nurses and allied health workers whose sole purpose is to build a culture of research within their hospitals. Their job is not just to run a single experiment, but to teach their colleagues how to ask scientific questions, design studies, and turn their daily clinical observations into published knowledge. The question remained, however, whether this new profession had actually taken root across the country, or if it was merely a paper idea confined to a few elite institutions.

To find the answer, a team of researchers from major French hospitals launched a nationwide survey in 2024 and 2025. They reached out to every type of healthcare institution in France, from massive university medical centers to smaller general hospitals and private non-profit clinics. Their goal was simple: to map where these coordinators were working, what they were actually doing, and how qualified they were. The survey gathered data from 122 institutions and identified 101 individual coordinators, providing the first complete picture of this workforce.

The results revealed a profession that is growing but unevenly distributed. The coordinators are present in two-thirds of the responding hospitals, confirming that the role has spread beyond its original home in university centers. However, the resources available to them vary wildly depending on where they work. In university hospitals, which are the largest and most research-focused institutions, coordinators are common and well-supported. On average, a university hospital employs more than one coordinator, and these individuals are given a significant amount of paid time to do their research work—about half of a full work week. In contrast, general hospitals, which serve the broader community, have far fewer coordinators. When they do have one, that person is often given very little protected time, sometimes less than one percent of their work week, forcing them to juggle research duties with their regular clinical shifts.

Despite these differences in funding, the nature of the work these coordinators perform is remarkably consistent and distinct from traditional research roles. The survey found that their primary mission is strategic rather than operational. They are not mostly busy recruiting patients for drug trials or managing data forms. Instead, they act as architects of a research culture. Their most common tasks include helping their colleagues design research projects, organizing workshops to teach staff how to read scientific literature, and building partnerships with universities. They are there to mentor nurses and therapists, showing them how to become researchers themselves. This focus on capacity building—teaching the workforce how to fish rather than just giving them a fish—is the defining feature of the French model.

The people filling these roles are highly educated, reflecting the country's ambition to professionalize the field. Most of the coordinators hold a master's degree, which is the expected entry level for the job, and nearly half are either currently pursuing a doctorate or have already earned one. This high level of academic training is most pronounced in university hospitals, where the majority of coordinators are engaged in doctoral programs. In other settings, the educational levels are lower, though still substantial. The workforce is also predominantly female, and while many started their careers as nurses, the group includes a mix of professionals from various health disciplines.

The study also highlighted how the coordinators are integrated into the scientific community. Those working in university hospitals are frequently affiliated with research laboratories, placing them directly within the academic engine of the institution. In other hospitals, this connection is much weaker, suggesting that the coordinators in those settings are more isolated from the broader research network. Nevertheless, the coordinators are active producers of knowledge. More than half of them have published scientific papers, and many have led their own research projects. This indicates that the role is successfully transitioning health workers from consumers of research into leaders who generate it.

The researchers concluded that France has successfully institutionalized a function that other countries often struggle to maintain. While other nations rely on temporary pilots or scattered initiatives to build research capacity, France has created a defined, permanent profession with a recommended path toward advanced degrees. The model is working, but it is not yet perfect. The clear gradient between well-resourced university hospitals and under-resourced general hospitals suggests that the promise of this new profession has not yet reached everyone equally. The coordinators in university centers are thriving, but those in smaller hospitals are often trying to build a research culture with very little time or support.

This national map serves as a crucial baseline. It proves that the profession exists and is active, but it also shows that the system needs to evolve to ensure that a nurse in a small town has the same opportunities to lead research as a colleague in a major city. The survey suggests that the next step for French health policy is to find ways to share these scarce resources across regional networks, ensuring that the strategic vision of the Paramedical Research Coordinator can take root in every corner of the healthcare system. The profession is no longer an experiment; it is a reality, but its full potential depends on bridging the gap between the well-funded and the under-resourced.