Nursing and Midwifery (MSc by Research)

Advanced Clinical Practice has increased exponentially in the UK. Advanced Clinical Practitioners now work in must areas of health care. There still remains a dearth of research about the benefits of the role apart from cost effectiveness and patient satisfaction. Additionally, there is an increase in these globally which would benefit from comparative research, especially in areas such as diagnostic reasoning and clinical decision making.

Please see our Scholarships page to find out about funding or studentship options available.

• Dr Melanie Rogers
• Professor Ann-louise Caress

Advanced Practice has been developing in the UK since the early 1990s. There are many clinicians working in this field yet the research in the UK remains limited, focusing mainly on patient satisfaction and cost savings. This topic is at the forefront of healthcare and needs to be more fully evaluated.

Please see our scholarships page at https://www.hud.ac.uk/research/howtoapply/scholarships to find out about funding or studentship options available

Please see details via the following web page https://www.hud.ac.uk/research/howtoapply/

• Dr Melanie Rogers
• Professor Ann-louise Caress

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has identified that although the number of people accessing assisted conception is increasing overall in the UK, rates remain low in BAME communities. Further under-represented are gamete donors from BAME communities. Projects in this area would likely use qualitative methods and may examine experiences and perceptions amongst various stakeholders, including individuals considering or with personal experience of assisted conception (individuals or couples), health professionals and community organisations.

Please see our Scholarships page to find out about funding or studentship options available.

• Dr Zoe Darwin
• Dr Berenice Golding

A review of the literature was conducted as the first phase of an international project to study the competencies of nurse educators who use Simulation-Based Education (SBL). Later, this project continued with the funding of a grant from the European Union (EU) to develop the competencies for nurse educators to integrate SBL into curriculum delivery. Laerdal, a major medical equipment manufacturer including medical simulators, have since adopted this framework to offer the educators who utilise SBL. The international project team are continuing with this development and are currently (2016) in a collaborative working relationship with Laerdal to develop the research.

Please see our scholarships page at https://www.hud.ac.uk/research/howtoapply/scholarships to find out about funding or studentship options available

Please see details via the following web page https://www.hud.ac.uk/research/howtoapply/

• Ms Lynda Dunn
• Dr Stephen Prescott

Patients and their families provide important feedback that can be used to inform the development and improvement of health services. In this programme of work we aim to explore different approaches to this process in clinical practice settings. Students will gain experience in qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Please see our scholarships page at https://www.hud.ac.uk/research/howtoapply/scholarships to find out about funding or studentship options available

Please see details via the following web page https://www.hud.ac.uk/research/howtoapply/

• Dr John Stephenson

Transferability of all research topics and how it produces change in clinical practice. There is also an important issue to research looking at the sociology of medicine and how the prescriber and APN is situated in the ‘professions’. Building capacity is also important - nurses and allied health professionals are being encouraged nationally to expand their practice. How do we build capacity in the undergraduate phase of their careers to facilitate advanced skills?

Please see our scholarships page at https://www.hud.ac.uk/research/howtoapply/scholarships to find out about funding or studentship options available

Please see details via the following web page https://www.hud.ac.uk/research/howtoapply/

• Dr Stephen Hemingway
• Dr Melanie Rogers

Spirituality is part of holistic care yet the concept is not well understand and health professionals struggle to integrate it into their practice. There is a need for more research in this area to ensure that spirituality is integrated into practice to provide fully holistic care.

Please see our Scholarships page to find out about funding or studentship options available.

• Dr Melanie Rogers
• Professor Ann-louise Caress

This proposal explores how to develop an often neglected but important aspect of person-centred care. Members of the Spirituality Special Interest Group at the University (now reconstituted as the Spirituality and Compassion Special interest Group, SCSIG and led by myself) have supported a number of PhD studies to date as well as conducted a number of research studies. The concept of Spiritually Competent Practice (SCP; Wattis, Curran and Rogers, 2017) was developed from one of these pieces of work (Jones, 2017). It understands spirituality as part of the human search for meaning and distinguishes it from religion, seeing spiritual care as an important part of holistic person-centred care. My own PhD explored how concepts of Availability and Vulnerability, based on the Celtic Christian tradition, could be ‘secularised’ in Advanced Nursing Practice in Primary Care (Rogers 2016). Earlier work in the group had looked at health care educators’ attitudes to and understanding of spirituality, using brief rating scales developed for the purpose (Prentis et al., 2014). Working in partnership with the local NHS Mental Health Trust we have explored and extended these studies into Mental Health staff (Rogers et al 2019/2020), looking at attitudes to spirituality in mental health care and exploring the utility of SCP and A&V in this context. A study looking at mental health patients’ views has been interrupted by the pandemic but is in progress. The next phase of our research is to extend similar work into the fields of primary care and secondary care. This proposal is for a study exploring attitudes of primary care clinicians (including General Practitioners and Advanced Practitioners) to spirituality and the utility of SCP and A&V in developing understanding in primary care. It would use a mixed methods approach and details of the project would be developed to incorporate interests of a prospective PhD candidate as well as the SCSIG group’s interest in the wider applicability of SCP and A&V as educational and clinical tools in this area.

Please see our Scholarships page to find out about funding or studentship options available.

• Dr Melanie Rogers
• Dr Michael Snowden

Electronic health record (EHR) systems have the potential to support the transformation of healthcare, with concurrent enhancements in both quality and safety. However, there needs to be a transformation also in the way in which we conceptualize the role of, and content of, EHR systems. Existing EHR systems fail to support and reflect the dynamic, interdisciplinary and patient-centred nature of healthcare practice, thereby inhibiting the optimal use of potentially valuable data. Research within this topic area seeks to explore new approaches to documentation, taking patient-centred care as its initial focus.

Please see our Scholarships page to find out about funding or studentship options available.

• Professor Nicholas Hardiker
• Dr Bibha Simkhada

There is now extensive evidence indicating how simulation-based learning (SBL) increases confidence and competence. Other studies have investigated various aspects of student learning using SBL. Simulation-based research needs to move beyond this and seek to investigate the impact that SBL has on patient care and outcomes. Measuring such impact can be problematic and as such be a barrier to developing this important understanding. Therefore, there is a need to develop and test robust tools and approaches that can be used for this purpose. Developing effective evaluative tools would offer the academy important resources to move beyond the present knowledge base on SBL in healthcare education.

Please see our Scholarships page to find out about funding or studentship options available.

• Dr Stephen Prescott

The achievement of essential procedural skills is a fundamental aspect of any pre-registration nursing programme. The delivery of these complex and often didactic clinical skills is challenging but necessary to adhere to the required professional standards (NMC, 2018). Current challenges include the range of additional procedural skills (NMC, 2018), increased student numbers and limited resources. Investigating alternatives to the traditional face-to-face approach used in many settings to deliver the teaching and practice of these essential skills is therefore needed.

Please see our Scholarships page to find out about funding or studentship options available.

• Dr Stephen Prescott

SBL has been utilised in different forms within healthcare education for decades. Despite this there exists limited data the impact that teaching and learning using SBL has on patient care and outcomes. This study would seek to develop and contribute to this essential understanding.

This would be a follow-up or concurrent study to the one above and therefore much of the brief outline above would also be applicable.

Please see our Scholarships page to find out about funding or studentship options available.

• Dr Stephen Prescott

Death, dying, and bereavement are significant human experiences that require social exploration. Just now, as the world continues to grapple with a myriad of challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, issues related to human mortality are resonating with the public and policymakers alike, with a renewed sense of importance.

To contribute to knowledge about lived experiences of death, dying and loss we welcome applications to conduct original research about different aspects of these experiences from social, cultural, and relational perspectives.

Indicative areas of study could include:
Personal relationships and intimacy at the end of life, inequalities, social identity, materiality and material culture, palliative and end of life care and particular experiences of loss such miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death.

Please see our Scholarships page to find out about funding or studentship options available.

• Dr Julie Ellis