Rate My Professor Val Ness

Dr Val Ness serves as Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Nursing, Community and Public Health within the School of Health and Life Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University. A registered nurse with extensive experience in emergency nursing, she joined the university in 2002 and progressed through various roles in learning, teaching, and curriculum development. Ness acted as programme development lead and subsequently programme lead for the large pre-registration BSc/BSc (Hons) Nursing Studies Programme, overseeing major programme reviews to align with professional body standards. She earned her PhD exploring nurse prescribers’ antimicrobial prescribing behaviour and pursued post-doctoral research on the role of nurses in antimicrobial stewardship (AMS). As a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, she has held multiple leadership positions, supervises PhD students in AMS, and engages in national and international collaborations, including with NHS Education for Scotland. Her work aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goals 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and 13 (Climate Action).

Ness leads the AMS workstream in the university's Safeguarding Health through Infection Prevention research group. Her research specializations encompass antimicrobial stewardship, infection prevention and control, nursing care interventions to prevent healthcare-associated infections, barriers and facilitators to infection prevention guideline implementation during COVID-19, and hand rubbing techniques for healthcare staff. Notable publications include the highly cited Cochrane review 'Preoperative fasting for adults to prevent perioperative complications' (Brady et al., 2010, 1130 citations), 'Preoperative fasting for preventing perioperative complications in children' (Brady et al., 2010, 369 citations), 'Supporting and mentoring nursing students in practice' (Ness, 2010), 'Exploring nursing students' decision-making skills whilst in a Second Life clinical simulation laboratory' (McCallum, Ness, Price, 2011, 109 citations), 'Development of consensus-based international antimicrobial stewardship competencies for undergraduate nurse education' (Courtenay et al., 2019, 56 citations), 'Influences on nurses’ engagement in antimicrobial stewardship behaviours: a multi-country survey using the Theoretical Domains Framework' (Chater et al., 2022, 49 citations), and recent outputs such as 'Deconstructing the six-step hand rubbing technique for healthcare staff: a mixed-methods investigation of efficacy, acceptability and feasibility' (Gozdzielewska et al., 2025) and 'Exploring the role of nursing care interventions in the prevention of non-device-associated healthcare-associated infections: a scoping review' (Collins et al., 2026). Through these contributions, she advances nursing education, practice, and policy in infection prevention.