PhD Researchers

Within the PhD I developed risk communication training to help practitioners improve their confidence and understanding when explaining the CVD risk score used in NHS Health Checks. The training proved very successful and has been commissioned in several local authorities since.

In 2017 I was employed as a research associate working on the RICO (RIsk COmmunication) project which aims to explore clinician and patient perception of CVD risk when using the differing risk calculators. Now I work as a CHAD researcher looking at four areas of health including healthy communities and places, healthy living, health inclusion and healthy starts.

My expertise is within NHS Health Checks and conducting research employing both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. However, my research areas of interest also include health promotion, prevention and behaviour change.

I have a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Applied Research both from Staffordshire University and I began my PhD with the Centre of Health and Development in 2019. My research focuses on experiences of suicide risk assessments in primary care settings. This involves working with experts by experience, both health care practitioners and people who have accessed care and experienced the assessments, to shape the projects and to bring their perspective into the development of guidelines for improvements.

https://sophiafedorowicz.com/

She has an MSc in Health Psychology and am presently undertaking a PhD in Natural Environments and Health in Staffordshire University. My research interest is the therapeutic effects of natural environments, specifically how natural environments and nature-based interventions can be used to support people living with long-term conditions. The contribution of my PhD will be to examine the positive effects of natural environments by testing types of exposures and measures that have not yet been investigated.

Her research is being conducted in the UK and Ireland, and as part of her PhD she is undertaking Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) where she works in partnership with patients with a lived experience of chronic pain to inform her research.

She is also a subcommittee lead for the development of a therapeutic garden in a community garden project in Ireland, where she works with local stakeholders to support the delivery of nature-based interventions for those with a lived experience of mental and physical ill-health within the community.

Aman is also interested in the wider fields of social psychology, health psychology and cyberpsychology. He is currently involved with the ‘Trucks and Child Safety’ (TaCS) and ‘Helping Our Pupils’ Emotions’ (HOPE) projects which are both ongoing.

Elliott completed an BSc in psychology and an applied research MSc at staffs university (graduating in 2019) with research projects focusing around Maths Anxiety. He has experience working with various software and hardware such as SPSS, Eye-tracking equipment and basic knowledge around Electrodermal Activity equipment. His interests also expand to Social and health psychology.

1. foreign nursing consultants and educators tend to teach from their own knowledge and experience, but often what they propose or teach doesn’t seem to connect to local nursing practice, and
2. while it is easy to translate nursing terms, conveying concepts behind those terms is difficult if there are different perceptions of what those terms mean.

To gain insight into these observations, Anne is conducting an ethnographic study on the roles and responsibilities of Mongolian nurses. Using a combination of field observations and interviews to develop a description of Mongolian nursing responsibilities in medical-surgical wards, she plans to compare these to what has been published about nursing in other countries.

I am therefore proposing to undertake

Gauge patients (and their families/carers) views on what concerns they have when newly diagnosed.

Provide support of other clinician’s responses to these questions and then phrase it in lay language with the aid of patient representative and their carers.

Explore digital tools to allow this information to be accessible to the patients.

Explore the option of developing interactive facility to allow patients to ask questions. These questions with me made on an ongoing basis. This will ensure that our resources are always updated with any new queries.

Study the impact of this new digital platform intervention on patient experience and whether it will reduce anxiety and stress, and thereby enhance the quality of life, until a definitive diagnosis is achieved.

There is no evidence base for this and as such my PhD project is to investigate the perception of the Judiciary on the credibility of Nurses as Expert Witnesses, as opposed to that of Doctors, within Adult Sexual Assault Cases.  This is being undertaken via Qualtrics Questionnaire sent out to Judges undertaking education and training programmes within the Judicial College.

As these examinations are predominantly carried out by Nurses in England, if such a perception exists within the Judiciary, a solution needs to be found to ensure such bias does not impact on the direction of the criminal justice system for the alleged victim.

An integral part of my role is to support staff to maximise the strengths of individuals and recognise their own resources as a key element in their recovery from mental health issues.  We try to move away from admitting individuals to long term nursing or residential care and to maximising community based independence but unfortunately, in a small number of cases, this is not always possible, and when we do admit people to this type of resource there is a massive cost both to the individual, the local health and social care economy and the community.

I aim to apply a new perspective to the analysis of assessment and care planning that leads to admission by looking at the Power, Threat, Meaning Model (Johnstone and Boyle 2018) as the focus of my PHD so I can see what was happening to the person at the time they were admitted as opposed to what was wrong with them. I hope that this will lead to learning for me and for the Social Care Pathway.

To identify such risks, police use a scripted risk assessment procedure that has remained largely unchanged since its inception. This assessment relies on the honesty and co-operation of the arrested person, involving mostly yes/no type closed questions. The last few years have seen additional social questions added to this process making it cumbersome and lengthy. MSc work also identified that this risk assessment often fails to identify health morbidity; increasing custodial risk.

The aim of this PhD is to bring about a greatly simplified risk assessment process that accurately identifies health morbidity and provides a timeline for courses of action. It will encourage more intuitive police thinking and lead to a speedier process.

Under the guidance of Staffordshire University, PhD studies are underway where an unknown destination awaits.

Her PhD consisted of three studies evaluating effects of exposure to natural environments on cognitive functioning and stress. Measures included the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (as a measure of neighbourhood greenness), computerised attention and memory tasks, heart rate, pupil size and hair cortisol concentration.