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Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care

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Job Vacancies

Research Assistant in Personalised Care For Parkinson's Disease PD-Care Closes 11th November 

Senior Research FellowCloses 19th November 

Research Fellow closes 27th November

PhD Opportunities

We encourage potential candidates to contact us about possible PhD projects all year round. Below is a list of potential supervisors we encourage you to contact and an example of some on-going work with potential PhD projects within these.

Potential projects

Our Centre undertakes a broad range of research on effective healthcare for older people, health promotion/behaviour change in later life, self-management of long-term health conditions, the epidemiology of ageing and age inequalities. Particular areas of interest are frailty, dementia, Parkinson's Disease, mental well-being, loneliness, health promotion in later life, and end-of-life care. CAPS is a multidisciplinary research group with expertise in the development and testing of complex interventions, health service research methodology, epidemiology of ageing and mixed methodology including qualitative methods. We are happy to work on new ideas in these themes with students, or projects linked to our ongoing work as detailed below.

Project: Personalised care for Parkinson's Disease (PD-Care)

Supervisors: Dr Kate Walters, Dr Nathan Davies, Prof Elizabeth Murray

There is an opportunity to join this new five-year programme of work funded by the NIHR due to start in Sept 2018, which will develop a new approach to support self-management for people with Parkinson's Disease (PD), integrating new technologies. Work includes a series of systematic reviews, qualitative studies, co-production of an intervention with people with PD and their carers, and ultimately a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT). There are several opportunities to develop PhD ideas linked to this work within the themes of self-management of long-term health conditions, preventing hospital admissions/improving non-specialist care for complex conditions and comorbidities and integrating new technologies into health care management.

Project: Predicting the onset of Parkinson's Disease (PD)

Supervisors: Dr Kate Walters, Prof Anette Schrag

This study would build on our work which explored prodromal symptoms for PD using routinely collected healthcare data, to examine risk factors for future PD and the role of potentially neuroprotective drugs. There is potential to develop a PhD in this field, suitable for someone who has quantitative analysis skills.

Project: Supporting family carers of people with dementia at the end of life: Developing a decision aid

Supervisor: Dr Nathan Davies

The end of life for someone with dementia can present a number of challenges and difficulties. Family carers are often the main providers of care and as the person with dementia lacks capacity are faced with making difficult decisions as proxy. There is currently a lack of support for family carers making decisions. We have just received funding from the Alzheimer's Society to develop and test the feasibility of a decision aid. There is an opportunity to join the team and contribute to a systematic review, secondary analysis of qualitative data and conduct semi-structured interviews with family carers and practitioners. There is potential to extend this into a PhD on decision making in dementia care.