BU Research Blog

Hi all,

This is just a quick post to introduce myself – I started in January as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Human Sciences and Public Health, and am working on the Implementing Nutrition Screening in Community Care for Older People (INSCCOPe) project (led by Professor Jane Murphy).

This project explores factors that may promote or inhibit successful implementation, and embedding in routine practice, of a new procedure for screening and treatment of malnutrition by integrated community teams (ICTs). The procedure is currently in development as part of service improvement work within Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, and the INSCCOPe project will run in parallel. The project will run for 14 months, and is informed by Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) (http://www.normalizationprocess.org/).

I’ve been made to feel very welcome in my short time at BU, and look forward to meeting new people in the faculty in future. Below is a short summary of my background and current research/development interests.

Kind regards,

Mike.

(p.s. apologies if you’re seeing this for the second time – I initially sent this around the HSS-staff list by mistake)

Dr. Mike Bracher (Post-doctoral Research Fellow, INSCCOPe project)
Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, Department of Human Sciences and Public Health, Bournemouth University.

Background:

I’m health sciences researcher with a social science background, and the majority of my research experience has been in the areas of autism and cancer.

I completed my PhD, an exploration of pre-diagnostic identity formation in the lives of people diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome in adulthood, at the University of Southampton from 2009-2013.

Following this, I completed a service evaluation and development project at the Autism Diagnostic Research Center (ADRC Southampton), which explored post-diagnostic support needs.

In February 2014, I moved to the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Southampton, where I worked as part of a team to produce the first analysis of free-text survey responses from a national (Wales) sample of cancer patients (http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/9/e011830).

I was also involved in methodological developments in the application of text mining to analyses of free-text responses from large surveys (http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/10/e007792), and a further analysis of free-text responses from patients in England who had been diagnosed with cancer of unknown primary (CUP).

From February 2015 to February 2017, I worked as a Research Fellow on the True Nth Decision Support: Understanding Consequences project, a complex intervention aiming to improve treatment decision support for men with low and moderate risk prostate cancer.

Current research interests and professional development aims:

My research interests are in the uses of data from applied health research to drive improvements in healthcare by:

better understanding the needs of specific populations;

understanding social and organisational processes that promote or inhibit successful provision of services or implementation of new technologies and innovations;

developing models and tools from theoretical and empirical knowledge of experiences and/or processes in healthcare, as a basis for service improvement.

My current professional development aims include:

further development in conversation analysis – conversation analysis offers a set of useful tools to describe and analyse micro-level processes that shape everyday interactions in healthcare settings;