Louise Summerfield
Louise joined CHAD in April 2016 as a PhD Candidate researching Social Isolation and Loneliness. She has most recently been working in staff research support and governance for Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Partnership NHS Trust. Louise has previously been a Research Fellow with the World Trade Center Evacuation Study at The University of Ulster. Her research interests include health inequality, severe mental illness and human behaviour.
Kostas Spyropoulos
Kostas joined the CHAD in July 2016 as a PhD Candidate researching the use of Technology to support behavioural change. His research interests derived from the Health Psychology’s spectrum such as addictive behaviours and behavioural change, screening and communicating health messages as well as health inequalities and Social Support. He has worked as a scientific consultant of several Greek Unions and Associations regarding the implementations of several European counseling programs focusing on issues of unemployment, equity and disability.
Victoria Riley
I completed my undergraduate degree at Staffordshire University in 2012 and then went on to complete the MSc in Health Psychology also at Staffordshire University in 2013. After time out working in other sectors, I began a PhD in 2015 which looks at understanding uptake and improving risk communication in the NHS Health Check programme.
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.
Sophia Fedorowicz
My interests are centred around experiences of mental distress and how people communicate those experiences; particularly in relation to policy and practice. The need to address the inequalities experienced by individuals living with mental distress has been the key motivator for my continuing professional and academic development. I am enthusiastic about public involvement in research and knowledge communication. I support CHAD projects as a research assistant by conducting data collection and qualitative analysis; recently working on projects about Women’s support services in Stoke-on-Trent and NHS Health Checks (for cardiovascular disease prevention). I also manage the CHAD twitter profile and blog.
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.
Patricia Darcy
Trish is a part-time researcher with CHAD. Her research interests include natural environments and health, health inequalities, Public and Patient Involvement (PPI). She has a MSc in Health Psychology and is presently undertaking a PhD in Natural Environments and Health in Staffordshire University. Her PhD is focusing on 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 her PhD will be to examine the positive effects of natural environments by testing types of exposures and measures that have not yet been investigated. Trish works in partnership with people with a lived experience of chronic pain conditions to inform her research.
Aman Mankoo
Aman is an early career researcher and has been volunteering as a part-time researcher with CHAD since October 2019. He has a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Applied Research and within these he focused on the psychology of conspiracy theories.
Elliott Phillips
Elliott joined CHAD in 2019 as a part-time researcher supporting on various ongoing projects within the CHAD centre. He has experience mainly around quantitative data collection but has since expanded into working around qualitative projects.
Anne Biro
Anne Biro is a Canadian nurse who is interested in understanding differences & similarities in nursing culture and practice among different countries. Her interest in this topic was piqued by two main observations as a result of living in Mongolia:
- 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
- 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.
Ideh Kont
My name is Ideh Kont, I work in the University Hospital of North Midlands. Currently I am a first year MPHIl/PHD student and working on digital technology supporting patients living with adrenal incidentaloma.
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.
Margaret Bannerman
Since 2014 over 10,000 forensic examinations of adult victims of alleged sexual assault have been undertaken by Nurses. This statistic is from just one service provider in England. However, in Scotland Nurses are currently prevented from undertaking such examinations due to the perceived lack of credibility of Nurses providing expert testimony in court.
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.
Mary Williams
I am currently working as a Social Care Pathway Manager with Midlands Partnership Foundation Trust. My specific area of interest is in Adult Mental Health and my area of work is South Staffordshire.
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.
Tim Miles
Custody healthcare is a specialist area, with many health care challenges. Substance misuse, alcohol abuse, mental disorders and an over representation of health morbidity are all risks that require identification within custody.
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.
Claudia Lega
Claudia Lega is a lecturer at University of Lincoln and PhD student at Staffordshire University. Her interests are natural environments, cognitive functioning, and stress.
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.