
BU hosting British Society of Criminology’s Hate Crime Network’s annual conference in June

Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
Yesterday Plos ONE published our latest study on the health system in Nepal under the title ‘Barriers in accessing family planning services in Nepal during the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative study‘ [1]. This qualitative study, in an Open Access journal, explores what sorts of barriers are faced by women needing family planning services in Nepal during the pandemic. It was conducted in five districts of Nepal. Telephonic in-depth interviews were conducted with 18 women of reproductive age (18–49 years) who were the regular clients of family planning services. Data were coded deductively using the preexisting themes based on a socio-ecological model (e.g., individual, family, community, and health-facility levels).
The authors conclude that policymakers and programme managers should consider strategies to ensure continued availability of the full method mix during emergency, particularly since disruptions may go unnoticed and strengthen the provision of services through alternative service delivery channels to ensure sustained uptake of such services in this sort of pandemic.
This is the latest addition to the pool of academic papers published by Bournemouth University academics on the effects of COVID-19 on health care in Nepal or issues related to Nepal [2-11].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health)
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The paper reports that of these 23 papers, 21 focused on assessing AHL measures, and 15 addressed the association between AHL and HP. Seven studies used the HL School-Aged Children instrument. The findings suggested that the methodological and conceptual underpinnings of HL measures are insufficient. Furthermore, HL acts as an independent and positive mediator for many facets of HP. Overall, this review offers a warning to practitioners and educationists interested in measuring HL as the number of measurement tools is substantial with different tools applying different scales.
The BNAC (Britain-Nepal Academic Council) twentieth Nepal Study Days (24-25 April) start today in Huddersfield. BU is directly represented through Dr. Pramod Regmi who will be presenting ‘Health Research Priorities and Needs in Migrant Health: A Review of Reviews’ today. Dr. Regmi based in the Department of Nursing Sciences and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Department of Midwifery & Health Sciences are also part of the paper ‘Nepal Family Cohort Study: Starting a Longitudinal Population Health Study’ which will be presented by our colleague Dr. Om P. Kurmi from Coventry University.
There will also be a BU paper on ‘Perceptions Around Covid-19 and Vaccine Hesitancy: A Qualitative Study Among People Living in Kaski, Western Nepal’ , presented by Dr. Preeti Mahato. Preeti is based at Royal Holloway (University of London) and she is also a Visiting Faculty member of FHSS. She’ll presenting a study recently published in PLOS Global Public Health.
These Nepal Studies Days pay serious attention to our ongoing interdisciplinary study ‘The impact of federalisation on Nepal’s health system: a longitudinal analysis’ which was reported in several national newspapers in Nepal last week. Tomorrow there will be a plenary session by Prof. Simon Rushton, the PI on this project in which BU collaborates. He will be talking about ‘Nepal’s Health System During Federalisation: Emerging Issues and the Co-production of Policy and Practice Recommendations’. Later that day there will be two further presentations based on this large-scale study, the first one by Dr. Sharada P. Wasti followed by one delivered by Dr. Sujata Sapkota.
The 2015 Constitution brought federalisation and with it, significant changes to the health system. To understand these changes researchers worked in three provinces where they interviewed 243 stakeholders, at all three levels of government. They also conducted 31 Participatory Policy Analysis workshops at local and province levels. The team includes researchers from Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (Kathmandu), and PHASE Nepal (Bhaktapur), and three UK institutions (the Universities of Sheffield, Bournemouth, and Huddersfield). It researchers from the UK and Nepal meet with Provincial and Federal MPs to discuss the interim findings of a federalisation and health study.
News articles appeared in national newspapers in Nepal, both in English and Nepali. The Nepali article appeared in the country’s oldest newspaper Gorkhapali, see copy here! Bournemouth University [Thank you Nathaniel Hobby and Stephen Bates] also publicized our press release on this project online. The journalist Nam Raj Bhatta published an item in the online Nepali-language newspaper NepalHealthOnline on April 13. The main meeting to discuss the interim findings of our project took place on Thursday 13 April an hotel close Nepal’s parliament. The interim results highlight how federalisation of the political system has affected Nepal’s health care organisation. The research team summarized the findings for the invited MPs and local and provincial political leaders, and invited their reflections on the political possibilities and obstacles to moving forward with the development of the country’s health system. The Himalayan Times published the article on top of this BU Research Blog as well as the special interview with the University of Sheffield based PI Prof. Simon Rushton.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health
In addition Jonathan also published a new edition of his popular textbook Introducing Social Work SECOND EDITION. This edited volume included chapters by BU academics Dr. Orlanda Harvey (Chapter 26) and Dr. Sally Lee (Chapter 22) as well as an array of internationally renowned social work academics.
Congratulations to Abier Hamidi on the acceptance of her Ph.D. paper ‘Facilitators and barriers to condom use in Middle East and North Africa: a systematic review’. [1] This review has been registered on PROSPERO. [2] The Journal of Public Health is part of BU’s publishing deal with Springer, hence it will free open access when published.
Abier is supervised by Dr. Pramod Regmi, Senior Lecturer in International Health and the Global Engagement Lead in the Department of Nursing Sciences, and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH). Earlier Abier published ‘HIV epidemic in Libya: Identifying gaps’ in 2021. [3]
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Late in 2022 we started a new interdisciplinary study funded by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). The research aims to reduce the deaths of newly-mobile toddlers from drowning in rural Bangladesh. This project called Sonamoni is being co-ordinated by Bournemouth University in collaboration with the University of the West of England, Bristol, the University of Southampton, the Poole-based Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and the Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh (CIPRB).
In Bangladesh, drowning is the leading cause of death in children between one and two years old. This low-income country has one of the highest rates of drowning, especially among children in the world. The risk of drowning in rural areas is twice that in cities, because there are significant numbers of ponds and ditches, creating natural drowning hazards for very young children. CIPRB has implemented several effective drowning prevention solutions focused on children over the past 15 years, including a successful daycare model to keep young children safely away from water. However, enrollment and attendance rates for children under two years (those at the highest risk of accidental drowning) have been low.
The team will be working with communities to apply human-centred design techniques in Bangladesh. Together they will identify and prioritise potential solutions, develop prototype interventions, and assess the acceptability and usability of proposed interventions.
This research is an excellent example of BU’s FUSION. BU endeavours to bring together Research, Education and Practice to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. FUSION is central to our Bangladesh project, the Research is focusing on social sciences and public health, the Education is around health education of people in rural communities as well as training of the research team members, whilst Practice will be the outcome of the human-centred design approach, when we test the best interventions.
The £1.6m project has been made possible thanks to a grant from the NIHR through their Research and Innovation for Global Health Transformation programme. For more information, visit the NIHR website. NIHR uses aid from the UK government to support global health research.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health)
The Nepal Family Cohort Study (NeFCoS) is a multidisciplinary cohort study into the prevalence, incidence, and determinants of various diseases from childhood to adulthood in children and their parents for over two decades. NeFCoS is a longitudinal study which recently started collecting health and well-being data, and which will collect data repeatedly from the same individuals at certain intervals for years to come. Our primary focus is understanding the multiple risk factors of health conditions in children and their families, early diagnosis of diseases, and prevention and management of diseases through effective intervention. The team aims to this by examining associations between exposure to known or suspected causes of disease, so-called risk factors and subsequent morbidity and mortality.
Our large international team is led by Dr. Om Kurmi, Associate Professor and Respiratory and Environmental Epidemiologist at Coventry University in the UK, and associated with McMaster University, Canada. The Bournemouth University team comprises Dr. Pramod Regmi (Senior Lecturer in International Health), Dr. Edwin van Teijlingen (Professor of Reproductive Health), and Dr. Vanora Hundley (Professor of Midwifery).
The team is currently recruiting six-to-nine-year-old children and their parents who have provided written consent to participate. The parents offer information on socio-demographics, lifestyle factors, dietary habits, occupational history, educational history, environmental conditions at home and outside, physical activities and any diseases they or their children have had since birth. They also undergo a series of measurements such as lung function, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, hand-grip strength, anthropometry, body fat percentage, muscle mass, body water content and skin-fold thickness as an indirect measure for malnutrition. The study is also measuring eleven different parameters in spot urine samples semi-quantitatively and plan to collect the biological specimen in future follow-ups studies. The study is currently being conducted in two regions of Nepal in the south, the Terai and in the more central hill part of the country, with plans to expand to extend to other provinces of Nepal in the future.
The baseline study is ongoing. So far, the team has collected over 4250 participants’ data from both study sites. We plan to complete the baseline data by the end of December 2023 with about 15,000 participants from the two regions. Our study is urgently needed in Nepal as it will provide valuable information for evidence-based decision-making regarding disease prevention and management along with changing policy.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH)
This paper adds to a growing volume of public health papers on COVID-19 in Nepal or Nepalese people living in the UK written by Bournemouth University academics. [2-11] These papers are co-authored with colleagues based in Nepal and in the UK. They include Nepalese academics based at the University of Sheffield, Royal Holloway, the University of Huddersfield, The University of Greenwich
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health
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Two days ago one of the participants of our British Academy funded Academic Writing Workshops announced on Facebook that the paper, we had helped her put together, had been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It is satisfying to see the fruits of our labours in print following two sets of three-day workshops in Kathmandu and Pokhara. The team running the 2022 workshop comprised three Faculty of Health & Social Sciences’ (FHSS) staff: Dr. Shovita Dhakal Adhikari, Dr. Pramod Regmi, and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, and our colleague Dr. Rashmee Rajkarnikar at Nepal’s oldest and largest university (Tribhuvan University) and BU’s Visiting Faculty Dr. Emma Pitchforth, who is Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow in Primary Care at the University of Exeter. Dr. Shovita Adhikari has since left Bournemouth University to become Senior Lecturer in Criminology & Sociology at London Metropolitan University.
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This methods article was developed based on the recruitment issues faced during Orlanda’s PhD research from which she has published several previous papers [2-6].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
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The NIHR INCLUDE Socioeconomic Disadvantage Framework launched on 24th January via a webinar.
This framework has been designed to aid researchers, who are designing clinical trials, to consider barriers to including patients from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds in their trial.
Socioeconomically disadvantaged refers to people living in less favourable social and economic circumstances than others in the same society. This is more than just low income, it’s the combination of various situations and experiences that can change over time, and describes the impact of a complex multidimensional problem that encompasses the social injustices and inequalities that contribute to further inequalities for people in our society that are already at their most vulnerable.
The framework can also help researchers to develop strategies to attempt to address such barriers in order to improve the design and conduct of clinical research. Although this framework was developed with UK-based clinical trials in mind, aspects may also be relevant to different types of research and research conducted in populations outside of the UK. Whilst this framework focuses on socioeconomic disadvantage, the list of underserved groups in clinical research is extensive and researchers need to be aware of this when identifying barriers to research and developing to strategies to address barriers.
The recording of the webinar, slides and the framework itself are available here.
Your local branch of the NIHR RDS (Research Design Service) is based within the BU Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU) If you need help with patient and public involvement (PPI) or any other aspect of your grant application, don’t hesitate to get in touch in the new year.
We advise on all aspects of developing an application and can review application drafts as well as put them to a mock funding panel (run by RDS South West) known as Project Review Committee, which is a fantastic opportunity for researchers to obtain a critical review of a proposed grant application before this is sent to a funding body or if you’re hoping to resubmit the panel can provide some excellent tips and feedback.
Contact us as early as possible to benefit fully from the advice
Feel free to call us on 01202 961939 or send us an email
This publication adds to our earlier work on the roles of PhD supervisors providing in-depth discipline-specific Public Health knowledge and technical (e.g., methodological) support to the students, encouraging them towards publications or conference presentations, offering pastoral support for student wellbeing, and finally preparing them to defend their thesis by conducting a mock viva. Our earlier paper focused on the responsibilities, opportunities, and sometimes the challenging nature of being a PhD supervisor in the field of Public Health in Nepal. [2]
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
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This week we published a paper on the experience of conducting fieldwork in the public health field in the Journal of Health Promotion. [1] Fieldwork is usually a crucial part of PhD research, not only in the health field. However, few researchers write about this, often challenging, process. This paper highlights various occasions where fieldwork in the area of public health, health promotion or community health was more difficult than expected or did not go as planned. Our reflections on working in the field are aimed at less experienced researchers to support them in their research development. Moreover, this paper is also calling upon health researchers to share more details about the process of doing fieldwork and its trials and tribulations. Our key advice is to be inquisitive and open-minded around fieldwork, followed by: be prepared for your fieldwork, conduct a risk assessment of what might go wrong, and consider your resources and options to overcome such trials and tribulations. Fieldwork can be unpredictable. We believe it is important to share practical lessons from the field which helps other to better understand these tribulations, and learn from them. Finally, sharing such information may guide new researchers and help them identify strategies that can address those issues and challenges in their future studies.
Dr. Preeti Mahato (at Royal Holloway, University of London), Dr Bibha Simkhada and Prof. Padam Simkhada (both based at the University of Huddersfield) are all BU Visiting Faculty. Moreover, I have had the pleasure of acting as PhD supervisor for five of my co-authors. I have included in this blog what is probably my favourite fieldwork photo taken a decade ago by former BU PhD student Dr. Sheetal Sharma.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health)
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Congratulations to Dr. Pramod Regmi on having two papers published in the latest issue of the Journal of Health Promotion which appeared online this week. The first paper reports on eight focus group discussions (FGDs) which explored: (a) perceptions of and motives toward social media re. sexual communication in educated unmarried young people in Nepal; and (b) their views of the link between social media and risky sexual behaviour. [1]
These FDGs were audio recorded, transcribed and thematically analyzed. All FGD participants were students (age range 15-22) from Kathmandu. Five themes emerged from the thematic analysis: a) use of and motives for using social media; b) sex education in general; c) sexual information through social media; d) social media’s role in forming romantic and sexual relationships; and e) negative experience of social media.
The second paper ‘Forgotten health and social care needs of left-behind families of Nepali migrant workers’ is led by FHSS PhD student Yagya Adhikari. This paper focuses on Pramod’s other research interest of the health and well-being of Nepali migrant workers. [2] The journal Journal of Health Promotion is freely available online through Open Access. Pramod is Senior Lecturer in International Health as well as Global Engagement Lead in the Department of Nursing Sciences.
Well done!
Professor Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health)
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Congratulation to FHSS PhD student on the publication of his article ‘Forgotten health and social care needs of left-behind families of Nepali migrant workers’ [1]. Yagya’s Ph.D. research title is “Parental migration and its impact on health and well-being of left-behind adolescents in Nepal” and his research is supervised by Dr. Pramod Regmi and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen. The Journal of Health Promotion is Open Access and hence freely available across the globe for anybody with internet access.
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Today The Washington Post mentioned Bournemouth University’s research into kidney disease in migrant workers from Nepal. Our research was highlighted in an article with the title ‘The world’s torrid future is etched in the crippled kidneys of Nepali workers‘ written by journalist Gerry Shih. Dr. Pramod Regmi and Dr. Nirmal Aryal, both in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, are leading on a research project on kidney health and migrant workers. The paper mentioned in The Washington Post is titled: ‘Risk of kidney health among returnee Nepali migrant workers: A survey of nephrologists’ [1]. This survey paper was published just over a year ago, in late 2021, and it was preceded by other papers on this issue [2-3].
Dr. Pramod Regmi is Senior Lecturer in International Health and, Dr. Nirmal Aryal recently returned to BU as researcher on a study into kidney disease among Nepalese migrant workers (funded by the Colt Foundation).
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
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