Category / REF Subjects

First publication of 2019

Featured academics, NHS, Publishing, Research communication, Research news, Uncategorized, writing

Having had the pleasure of announcing the last BU publication yesterday, today we received an email that our paper ‘Design errors in vital sign charts used in consultant-led maternity units in the United Kingdom’ has been accepted by the International Journal of Obstetric Anesthesia.  This paper is led by FHSS Visiting Faculty Gary Smith and Richard Isaac and has as co-authors Vanora Hundley, Lisa Gale-Andrews and Edwin van Teijlingen as well as two further BU Visiting Professors: Mike Wee and Debra Bick.

Final publication of 2018

BU research, PG research, Publishing, Research news, student research, Uncategorized, writing

Congratulations to Orlanda Harvey on the publication of her paper ‘Shades of Grey’: The Ethics of Social Work Practice in Relation to Un-prescribed Anabolic Androgenic Steroid Use. Orlanda Harvey is a PhD student in the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences with a research interest in image and performance enhancing drug (IPED) use.  Her paper will be published in Practice: Social Work in Action.  

This paper highlights ethical dilemmas that social workers face when assessing risk in relation to those using substances. It explores how legislation and societal factors can impact not just on people’s choices and decisions but also on their ‘vulnerability’ and access to services. Vulnerability, a contested term, is linked, in this paper, to assessment of risk. There are ethical issues that arise when assessing risk with people who use Anabolic Androgenic Steroids (AAS) from both service user and professional perspectives. These ethical issues concern a person’s right to choose whilst making potentially harmful decisions. The paper argues that using substances such as AAS in and of itself does not suffice to make a person vulnerable but this does not mean that people using AAS are not in need of support. It suggests that there may be some groups of people who are more at risk to starting AAS use and that social workers should be aware of these. It also recommends the need for further qualitative research to understand the reasons for starting use and support to help people stop using AAS.

Well done!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Recruiting Researcher for AHRC funded project

Awarded & submitted bids, BU research

The Law Department is seeking to recruit an experienced and enthusiastic researcher to work on an AHRC funded project designed to create Mass Grave Protection Guidelines.

The project will address the question of how best to protect Mass Graves to secure truth and justice for survivors. The project will do this by bringing together experts and stakeholders from the forensic sciences, criminal investigations, legal profession, NGOs, international organisations, security sector and survivor groups. Through a process of consultations and round-table discussions with these experts, Mass Grave Protection Guidelines will be developed and, once finalised, translated and disseminated to stakeholders.

Ideal candidates should demonstrate excellent legal research, organisational and communication skills. Prior knowledge of research project management is desirable.

This post is available part-time and fixed term basis for 21 months. The Project foresees the following working pattern throughout the 21-month period:

  • Months 0-6 at 0.4 FTE
  • Months 07-16 at 0.2 FTE
  • Months 17-21 at 0.4 FTE

For further information and discussion, please contact Dr. Melanie Klinkner, Project Principal Investigator.

From one NIHR Fellowship to another!

Awarded & submitted bids, NHS, Research Training

From one NIHR Fellowship to another!

This week I complete my 3-year, 100% FTE NIHR Career Development Fellowship. After the Christmas holiday I then start on a new NIHR Clinical Trials Fellowship.

If you’re not familiar with NIHR fellowships you can find out more here: https://www.nihr.ac.uk/our-research-community/NIHR-academy/nihr-training-programmes/fellowship-programme.htm. The NIHR have re-packaged their fellowship programme and so the Career Development Fellowship is no longer available, as it has been superseded with an Advanced Fellowship.

The Career Development Fellowship has been a career-changing experience. It not only provides you with funding to lead a multidisciplinary team to conduct a research project of importance, but the opportunity to undertake a training and development programme. This has enabled me to further develop my skills and expertise in clinical trial research methods so that I can undertake larger, more complex studies, and therefore go on to produce much higher quality work with greater impact.

The new fellowship that I will start in January 2019 is a Clinical Trials Fellowship. These are designed to provide further advanced research methods training in clinical trials. They provide hands-on experience with several trials at different phases of progression and are to be based in a clinical trials unit. For me, I will be based at PRIMENT, the Clinical Trials Unit at UCL with expertise in trials conducted in primary care and to do with mental health, including my area of dementia. This will help consolidate the experience I have gained so far and training from completing an MSc in Clinical Trials, with further hands-on experience in dementia trials at a leading trials unit.

I can highly recommend NIHR fellowships and happy to discuss them with colleagues interested in applying for one.

Dr Samuel Nyman

Successful Away Day for the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health

BU research, Fusion, HSS Our 9 Research Entities, international, NHS

CMMPH held its annual away day on the 12th December and was led by the Centre leads, Professors Edwin van Teijlingen and Susan Way. It is an opportunity for BU staff, PGR students and Visiting Faculty to come together and share their research development and impact over the previous year. Time is also given to thinking ahead to ensure the Centre is meeting its aims of promoting the health and wellbeing of women, babies and their families by enhancing practice through education, research and scholarship.

The morning started with an update about EDGE, an NHS IT platform that provides a governance framework for tracking NHS research studies. Doctoral students whose studies require NHS ethics approval will have their research tracked through this system. Other discussions included an update on REF and BU2025, developing a publications strategy and match-funded PhD studentships.

  

Luisa Cescutti-Butler                            Malika Felton

Several PGR students presented their work to date, ranging from rising caesarean section rates in hospitals in Nepal (Sulochana Dhakal working towards Probationary Review); acute and chronic effects of slow and deep breathing upon women who have pregnancy-induced hypertension (Malika Felton working towards Major Review); updating the understanding perineal practice at the time of birth by midwives (Sara Stride working towards Probationary Review) and women’s experiences of caring for their late preterm babies (Dr Luisa Cescutti-Butler recently awarded doctorate). The presentations were all excellent and produced a lot of questions and discussion. Well done to all those who presented.

 

Sulochana Dhakal                                                 Sara Stride

The afternoon was used as an opportunity to think ahead about future collaborative research, how this fits in with the Centre aims and objectives as well as meeting the university’s ambitions to be a world class organisation.

The day was really enjoyable with a lot of positive feedback.

 

Edwin and Sue

Congratulations to Dr. Mariam Vahdaninia

BU research, Featured, NHS, Publishing, Research communication, Research news, Uncategorized, writing

Congratulations to Dr. Vahdaninia in FHSS on the publication of her PhD paper ‘ω-3 LCPUFA supplementation during pregnancy and risk of allergic outcomes or sensitisation in offspring: a systematic review and meta-analysis’ which has been accepted by the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. This journal is published by Elsevier and has an Impact factor of 2.6.

This paper addresses the increasing global trend in allergic diseases over the past last two decades with children suffering the highest burden. The increasing burden of allergic conditions is an important public health concern and understanding how to prevent the development of allergic diseases is a vital area of research. In this paper, the authors have assessed the effectiveness of omega-3 fatty acids in randomised controlled trials that have supplemented pregnant women during pregnancy for prevention of allergic diseases in children. Their results have shown that intake of omega-3 fatty acids during pregnancy can reduce the risk of sensitisation to egg and peanut in children. These findings have important implications in research since food allergies are common in children and are a key risk factor for developing sensitisation to aero-allergens and allergic respiratory diseases later in life.

The publication is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anai.2018.12.008

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

MIDIRS reproduced Afghanistan paper

BU research, Featured academics, international, PG research, Publishing, Research news, Uncategorized, writing

Dr. Rachel Arnold’s paper ‘Parallel worlds: an ethnography of care in an Afghan maternity hospital’ [1] originally published in Social Science & Medicine (Elsevier) has been reprinted in full in MIDIRS.  This is quite an accolade and should help this paper reach a wider audience.  Rachel graduated with a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences in 2016, illustrating that some of the best papers get into print (long) after completing one’s Ph.D. thesis.

 

 

Reference:

  1. Arnold, R., van Teijlingen, E., Ryan, K., Holloway, I. (2018) Parallel worlds: an ethnography of care in an Afghan maternity hospital, Social Science & Medicine 126:33-40.

REF Internal Review Panels – Recruiting Now!

BU Challenges, BU research, REF Subjects, Research assessment

To help us prepare for our upcoming submission to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 we are establishing a number of internal review panels to review and assess BU’s research outputs and impact case studies.

Expressions of Interest (EoI) are invited from academic staff who are interested in being a Panel Member. There will be one panel per Unit of Assessment (UOA) listed below. Those interested should identify which UOA Panel they would like to be considered for and put forward a short case (suggested length of one paragraph) as to why they are interested in the role and what they think they could bring to it. EoIs should be emailed to ref@bournemouth.ac.uk by 14th December 2018.

UOA Teams would particularly welcome EoIs from those who have:

  • Experience reviewing for previous REF stocktake exercises
  • Experience in editorship
  • Experience peer review

Full details of the role, the process of recruitment and terms of reference for the panels themselves can be found here.

Any queries regarding a specific panel should be directed to the UOA Leader. General enquiries should be directed to Shelly Anne Stringer, RKEO.

Unit of Assessment UOA Leader(s)
2 Public Health, Health Services and Primary Care Prof. Edwin Van Teijlingen
3 Allied Health Professions, Dentistry, Nursing and Pharmacy
4 Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience Dr. Peter Hills
11 Computer Science and Informatics Prof. Hamid Bouchachia
12 Engineering Prof. Zulfiqar Khan
14 Geography and Environmental Studies Prof. Rob Britton
15  Archaeology Prof. Kate Welham and Prof. Holger Schutkowski
17 Business and Management Studies Prof. Dean Patton
18 Law Dr Sascha-Dominik Bachman
20 Social Work and Social Policy Prof. Jonathan Parker
23 Education Prof. Julian McDougall and Prof. Debbie Holley
24 Sport and Exercise Sciences, Leisure and Tourism Prof. Tim Rees (Sport) Prof. Adam Blake (Tourism)
27 English Language and Literature Prof. Bronwen Thomas
32 Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory Prof. Jian Chang
33 Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies Prof. Kerstin Stutterheim
34 Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management Prof. Iain MacRury

 

seca mBCA Body Composition Demonstration – 4th December, 2pm, RLH

NHS


Just a reminder that BUCRU will be hosting a demonstration by Seca UK who will be showing BIA body composition analysers.  Tuesday 4th December at 2pm, R508, Royal London House. The standing mBCA 515 and portable mBCA 525 are multi-frequency, and offer medically precise measurements of fat mass, fat free mass, visceral fat in litres, hydration status, energy, fat-mass to muscle-mass ratio, segmental skeletal muscle mass, BIVA Chart, phase angle, and cardiometabolic risk, with results presented in just 17 seconds in a motivational and visually appealing format.  seca mBCA BIA products are clinically validated against the “gold standard” for body composition – MRI, ADP, DEXA, NaBr, D20.

 

The demonstration will last approx. 45-60 minutes, which will be sufficient time to view the demonstration and analyse the results and plenty of time for questions/discussions.

 

Please email BUCRU to advise if you plan to attend.

 

Supporting literature & validation papers for the mBCA 515 available upon request.

Two papers rejected the day after submission in same week

BU research, Featured academics, international, PG research, Publishing, Research communication, Research Training, student research, Uncategorized, writing

This week we had this enviable record of two academic papers on health topics being rejected the day after submission.  The first paper was submitted on Monday to Issues in Mental Health Nursing.  Our paper reported the Content Analysis of a review of the nursing curricula on mental health and maternity care issues in Nepal. The journal editor emailed us the next day to inform us that the topic was interesting, but not relevant enough to the journal’s readers.

The second paper submitted by a different configuration of staff was submitted last Friday to the Journal of Youth & Adolescence.  The second paper reported a qualitative study on students views on abortion in the south of England.  This journal’s rapid reply came the next day (yesterday) stating that:

Unfortunately, the editors have completed an internal review of your study and have deemed your manuscript inappropriate for our journal. Although your manuscript has important strengths, the journal has moved away from supporting qualitative work (unless it would be part of a journal special issue). Please rest assured that our decision has nothing to do with the quality of your study or findings.

On both occasion we had discussed potential journals and we thought we had targeted appropriate journals for the respective manuscripts.  Moreover, in both manuscripts we managed to cite at least one paper published in the journal to which we had submitted it.  The general message to my colleagues is that it does not matter how many papers you have written and submitted, you will: (1) occasionally opt for the wrong journal; (2) continue to face regular rejection by journal editors; and (3) have an opportunity to submit to another journal.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health

Shaping Media Policy and Regulation

BRIAN, Impact, Knowledge Transfer, policy

Following a business engagement event on Digital Strategy and Business Transformation and subsequent publications in academic and practitioner journals, Dr Oliver’s work on the strategic digital transformations of the UKs Creative Industries and media firms has been credited with shaping Ofcom’s media policy and regulation. Ofcom recently commented that his research into the how Sky Plc had managed the digital transition over the past twenty years provided them with a unique insight into Sky’s strategic approach, and it enabled them to “think differently about their ‘growth strategy’ and diversification into new markets such as broadband, fixed and mobile telephony”. Ofcom concluded that Sky had in fact contributed to increased levels of competition in those sectors.

Ofcom also confirmed that the research had helped them to consider their remit as a communications regulator and the potential areas where they could use their expertise in the future, most notably in terms of the potential future regulation of the internet.

Dr Oliver’s research – ‘Strategic Transformations in the Media’ can be found on BRIAN.