HealthJobsUK

Salary: £37,332 - £63,152 per annum, including London Weighting Allowance depending on whether applicant is medically trained.
Business unit: Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care
Department: Palliative Care, Policy & Rehabilitation.
Location: Denmark Hill Campus
Category: Research.

We are pleased to announce two PhD training fellowships available through the BuildPall capacity building programme at the Cicely Saunders Institute, King’s College London. We welcome applications from candidates with a healthcare background, including doctors, nurses, and allied healthcare professionals such as physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and pharmacists. These fellowships, spanning three years, aim to support individuals in conducting substantial research in palliative care and translating their findings into education programmes, impactful publications, and practical solutions.

BuildPall is dedicated to building a cadre of leading clinical academics, researchers, and educators committed to advancing palliative care. This includes training future clinicians, conducting research, and improving care for individuals affected by serious illness.

These fellowships offer a unique opportunity for promising individuals to work alongside world-renowned researchers and clinicians, establishing themselves as leaders in the field of palliative and end-of-life care. The awardees will develop a diverse set of research skills, gain experience in nationally and internationally significant research, and receive mentorship to lead the design, implementation, and dissemination of their research. They will also have access to leadership training to prepare them for future roles in clinical academia and academic palliative care.

The first fellowship funded by The Dinwoodie Charity and supported by Cicely Saunders International focuses on improving care and symptom management and empowerment for people who are not accessing specialist palliative care services and empowering their families and those important to them.

You will analyse data from two international mortality follow-back surveys (a well-established method of collecting views from bereaved relatives and family members about the last three months of life) and its impact on bereavement and grief. You will: understand successes and gaps in care for people during the last three months of life and importantly their families, which settings or transitions are most challenged (for example home or hospital) and how these influence perceived quality of life and person-centred outcomes; identify the different trajectories in the last three months of life and the points at which clinicians might more easily recognise opportunities to provide intervention to inform clinical guidelines; co-design educational materials to improve care and evaluate these for wide use by postgraduate clinicians.

The second fellowship funded by Cicely Saunders International offers a unique opportunity for a clinician or medical professional to engage in an innovative research project. This project integrates cutting-edge measurement theory with industry-leading practices to develop tailored measurement tools that address the specific needs of underserved populations.

You will be involved in further developing an existing outcome measure, the Integrated Palliative care Outcome Measure (IPOS) for clinical trials and related studies with special regards to ensuring its validity in underserved groups. You will work with an international team of experts and conduct research to explore the views of people from underserved groups and identify ways to improve their involvement in research and measurement, analyse existing IPOS data collected from research studies in different populations to determine its measurement properties in different groups and relationships to other outcome measures and co-produce ways to incorporate these findings into existing measurement frameworks and disseminate findings widely. You will lay a crucial role in generating evidence to address pressing questions related to access and equity in healthcare.

Both fellows will foster interdisciplinary collaborations, improve treatment strategies and drive advancements in clinical management. Additionally you will contribute to workshops, develop clinical guidance, expand research methodologies and disseminate educational materials.

These Fellowships are expected to deliver findings to improve the care for millions of people who are not able to access specialist palliative care by better understanding need, trajectories and how to respond. The resulting education materials will ensure wide impact alongside quality publications and impact in multiple domains including clinical care, service organisation and policy, education, national and local policy, NHS organisations and patients/families.

We encourage individuals with any healthcare background (medicine, nursing, allied health professionals) to apply. This fellowship covers salary, PhD fees (at the UK level), and research expenses, providing comprehensive support for career development and patient care improvement through palliative and end-of-life care research. Applicants undergoing clinical training are welcomed.

Interviews are tentatively scheduled on Wednesday 12 June 2024.

This post will be offered on a fixed term contract for 3 years.

This is a full-time post - 100% full time equivalent.

Contact details: Professor Irene Higginson. [email protected]

To apply, please click “Apply Now”.

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/088305-phd-training-fellow-dinwoodie-and-cs-international

Closing date: 22 May 2024.