Success of Postdoctoral Development Programme in HSC

The School of Health and Social Care has recently launched a new postdoctoral development programme aimed at those staff who have completed their doctoral studies. Prof Elizabeth Rosser (Associate Dean) provides an overview of how the programme works and the benefits to those involved…

A new postdoctoral development programme has commenced in HSC to offer those who have completed their doctoral studies the opportunity to move forward collectively as well as individually in their research endeavours. 

Initially the programme has focused on Nurses with the idea of running the programme again using an interprofessional group within the School, and maybe this could ultimately be a University-wide initiative with interschool activity?

The programme has commenced focusing on developing the skills of participants in the area of bidding for research grants, sharing the experiences of those with a range of bidding activity under their belts and encouraging all members to engage in undertaking one bid during the life of the programme.

This 6-month programme which commenced February 2011 has already made an impact.  One afternoon per month the group of 10 postdoctoral academics, drawn from each of the research centres in the School,  engage with the professoriate in learning the skills of bidding for research grants, sharing the lessons learned, as well as the challenges and the pitfalls.  Whilst there are key areas addressed during the programme, essentially the action learning group is informal with the programme content arising from queries and suggestions from the group itself.  The atmosphere offers an air of excitement and is informal and very informative with a buzz of spontaneity and active discussion.  The testimonials provided here show just how useful the programme has been to participants as well as to the HSC professoriate.

We need to do more of this….

Professor Elizabeth Rosser

Associate Dean (Nursing)

School of Health and Social Care

One Response to “Success of Postdoctoral Development Programme in HSC”

  1. Colleen Harding

    It is great to hear about the success of the group to help prepare research bids for external funding in HSC. We have also, in the past, offered University-wide action learning sets on funding and other issues (eg publishing) on the RREP and EREPP Programmes, some of which resulted in cross-university collaboration and funding bids, as well as supporting staff individually.

    We are currently in the process of developing more internal action learning set facilitators, so if you are interested in joining a cross-institutional action learning set for academics, or in becomning an action learning set facilitator, please email staffdevelopment@bournemouth.ac.uk.

    Best wishes Colleen Harding
    Head of Organisational and Staff Development