Category / Research news

An interdisciplinary approach to thinking about pain

Research Centres, Research news, research staff

Congratulations to Professor Carol Clark, Dr Sujan Marahatta and Professor Vanora Hundley for their new interdisciplinary paper exploring the prevalence of pain catastrophising among women of reproductive age in Nepal.

It is well-acknowledged that there are multiple factors that contribute to constructing perceptions of pain – this paper explores previous pain experiences and the prevalence of pain catastrophising. The team found a high prevalence of pain catastrophising in Nepal, which could contribute rising obstetric intervention, particularly caesarean births, in Nepal.

The work is part of a programme of work looking at how best to support women during the latent phase of labour (early labour). You can hear more about this work by listening to a recent vodcast from Carol and Vanora:

Pain in Childbirth: An Interdisciplinary Approach – By: Prof. Vanora Hundley and Prof. Carol Clark (youtube.com)

BU receives share of over £33m in funding from the NIHR to inspire health and care students and professionals into research

BU research, Doctoral College, Featured, Postgraduate Research, Research communication, Research news

BU has received a share of £33.2m in funding to provide research training for health and care students and early career professionals. 

The funding, from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), is part of the new INSIGHT: Inspiring Students into Research scheme, which aims to help students and those at early career stages in health and care to explore a range of research careers.

Nursing students laughing in one of the simulation wardsIn partnership with the University of the West of England (UWE) and regional organisations, we have received £1.4m to deliver the INSIGHT programme for the South West Central region.

This includes providing fully funded Master’s with Research (MRes) programmes and a range of engagement activities – such as workshops, networking opportunities and mentoring programmes to promote research careers within health and care.

Professor Carol Clark, Professor in Physiotherapy at Bournemouth University who is leading the INSIGHT programme at BU, said: “The NIHR INSIGHT programme provides an outstanding opportunity for health and care professionals to build their research skills. Embedding research into careers has the potential to improve outcomes for all the people who access health and care in England.

“We are delighted to be working alongside UWE to deliver MRes programmes for the South West Central region for the next three years, building research capacity and capability.”

Dr Adele Drew-Hill, Dean and Head of School of Health and Social Wellbeing at UWE, said: “We’re delighted to be working with Bournemouth University to deliver this innovative and engaging programme designed to enable students to explore a career in research. Our shared vision is to develop the leading regional hub for healthcare research skills development in the Southwest.”

The INSIGHT Programme funds a wide range of engagement activities and research Master’s places for current students and recent graduates within healthcare, social work and public health professions.

The £33.2m funding from the NIHR is for three years and supports institutions across 12 regions in England to deliver engagement programmes to attract people into research careers, and fully-funded Research Master’s places to train those new to research.

Professor Waljit Dhillo, Dean of NIHR Academy, said: “We know how important early exposure to research is for helping students and early career professionals develop the knowledge and skills needed to join the research workforce and build successful research careers in the future.

“I’m delighted that we can invest in our next generation of researchers in the South West Central region, and show students all of the benefits that research roles and careers have to offer.”

For more information about the opportunities available in the South West Central region, please visit https://insight-southwestcentral.net/ 

For more information about the INSIGHT programme, please visit the NIHR website.

BU e-health paper read 4,000 times

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Our paper ‘Midwives’ views towards women using mHealth and eHealth to self-monitor their pregnancy: A systematic review of the literature’ [1] reached 4,000 reads on ResearchGate today.  Obviously, there is a growing interest in the use of mobile apps as well as the more general application of mHealth and eHealth in the UK and elsewhere.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health

Reference:

  1. Vickery, M., van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V., Smith, G. B., Way, S., Westwood, G. (2020). Midwives’ views towards women using mHealth and eHealth to self-monitor their pregnancy: A systematic review of the literature. European Journal of Midwifery, 4: 1-11. https://doi.org/10.18332/ejm/126625

Drowning prevention meeting for NIHR-funded study

BU research, COVID-19, Featured, international, PG research, Research news, Uncategorized

This week our collaborators on the Sonamoni project traveled from Bangladesh and Uganda to Dorset for a set of research planning meetings.  The visitors represented CIPRB (The Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh) and DWB (Design without Borders).  They were hosted by colleagues from Bournemouth University, the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute) and from the University of Southampton.  Since Monday we managed to have an intensive week of design workshops, reviewing and incorporating local-community prioritised interventions for child drowning prevention (aged <2years) in Bangladesh.  I say ‘we managed’, but I have been at home all week with COVID-19.  The past few days I was beginning to feel quite well again, so I was unpleasantly surprised that I was still positive when I tested yesterday, and even more so this morning.  Consequently, missing the whole week working with our visiting collaborators.

The Sonamoni project recently presented its own video recording on YouTube,which you can watch here!

Sonamoni is a public health project is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) through its Research and Innovation for Global Health Transformation programme. For more information, visit the NIHR website.

 

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)

Third INRC Symposium: Interdisciplinary Computational and Clinical Approaches at the Edge of Brain Research

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Last month, we celebrated the third symposium of the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Centre at the Inspire Lecture Theatre, entitled “Interdisciplinary Computational and Clinical Approaches at the Edge of Brain Research”.

This year, our symposium revolved around two linking themes: applied machine learning for understanding neuroscientific data and translational neuroscience. We choose to contrast these two themes because they show the breadth of areas of the centre and steer the debate on potential synergies.

The event started with an exciting talk by Prof. Miguel Maravall (director of the Sussex Neuroscience Centre of Excellence, Sussex University).  Dr Maravall presented new experiments testing the idea that the function of the somatosensory cortex -beyond processing input information about an object’s features- represents the decision to act and even the outcomes of such actions. The recording of this lecture is available here.

Next, the first session concentrated on computational approaches. In this focused session, we enjoyed three talks. The opening talk by Michak Gnacek (Emteq Labs Emteq Labs, Brighton and Centre for Digital Entertainment, BU) showcased his appealing results on affect recognition in Virtual Reality leveraging multimodal physiological recordings and continual machine learning. The second speaker was Dr Géza Gergely Ambrus (Department of Psychology, BU). Dr Ambrus presented gripping new findings that extend the application of multivariate pattern analysis beyond face perception to other facial characteristics to explore underlying neural mechanisms. Finally, Dr Matteo Toscani (Department of Psychology, BU) discussed a series of intriguing studies over the recent years on unsupervised learning approaches -such as avant-grade deep autoencoders- for inferring haptic material properties.

After this first session, Prof. Jonathan Cole (University Hospital Dorset, NHS) opened the second session centred on clinical neuroscience. In his inspiring talk, Dr Cole discussed his research on patients with congenital and acquired complete absence of touch and movement/position, showing how the absence of these senses leads to different alterations in proprioception. Next, Prof. Caroline Edmonds (Department of Psychological Sciences, University of East London) presented a fascinating study on real-life implications of co-occurring memory impairments in children with neonatal hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy. The study evaluated memory function in school-aged children with this condition who received hypothermia treatment and survived without extensive neuromotor impairment.

To conclude the symposium, Prof. Birgit Gurr (Community Brain Injury and Adult Neuropsychology Services Dorset at Dorset HealthCare University, NHS) and Dr Ellen Seiss (Department of Psychology, BU) introduced a compelling evaluation of the dynamic information processing programme, encompassing mental exercises fostering the recovery of patients from a stroke.

After the symposium, we visited the Multimodal Immersive Neuro-sensing lab for natural neuro-behavioural measurement (MINE), led by Dr Xun He.

All in the INRC would like to wholeheartedly thank the speaker and the attendees for the fascinating talks and exciting debates we had. If you are interested in getting in touch, contributing or joining the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Centre, please do not hesitate to contact Ellen Seiss (eseiss@bourenmouth.ac.uk) or Emili Balaguer-Ballester (eb-ballester@bournemouth.ac.uk).

Thank you again for your interest, and we are looking forward to seeing you in our upcoming activities.

Kind regards,

Ellen and Emili, on behalf of all of us at the INRC

 

Our Digital Lives – ESRC Festival of Social Sciences

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This year the national ESRC Festival of Social Sciences theme is ‘Our Digital Lives’. For the festival, BU is supporting events that will run between Saturday October 19th and Saturday November 9th. Jayne Caudwell and Frankie Gaunt in the Department of Social Sciences and Social Work were awarded up to £1,000 to hold an event in the festival.  Their event is an art exhibition focused on “Communities of Positive Well-Being: The Digital Lives of LGBTQ+ Young People”. 
The aim of the event is to showcase on-line spaces that help LGBTQ+ young people feel safe, happy and that they belong. This is important because existing research shows that physical space can be a hostile public place for LGBTQ+ people. This hostility can lead to feelings of marginalisation, exclusion and isolation.
Before the art exhibition, a series of workshops will take place with local LGBTQ+ young people to explore how social media and the internet provide opportunity for positive stories at a time when mainstream media can be negative in its coverage of LGBTQ+ issues. The workshops are funded by the Centre for Seldom Heard Voices and will run in August and at the start of October.  During the workshops participants will decide the artwork that will be used for the art exhibition. The art exhibition will be displayed in and around Bournemouth and Dorset.
Check out the CSHV twitter @BU_SeldomHeard to share information about the upcoming workshops

Congratulations to Dr Daisy Wiggins for her successful bid for NIHR Undergraduate Internship funding

BU research, Research Centres, Research news, research staff, student research

Dr Daisy Wiggins was successful in her bid for NIHR Undergraduate Internship funding. This is a small aspect of a much larger body of work being done in collaboration with University Hospitals Dorset (UHD) with Minesh Khushu consultant Neonatologist at UHD, Dr Steve Trenoweth and Michael Lyne here at BU. Daisy, supervised by Prof Vanora Hundley and Steve T. will herself be supervising a BU undergraduate student who has just successfully interviewed. The intern will be looking at the literature available on women and families involved in care proceeding particularly looking at current support, interventions and help offered during pregnancy or at the removal of their baby. 

As of 2022, 86.9% of women attending court for care proceedings, had cases whereby the child/ren were less than 11 months old and a large majority were babies (Alrouh et al. 2022). The evidence is clear on how this has a significant impact on the newborn in the immediate postnatal period, but also in terms of future development. Furthermore the wider impact on the woman, families and care systems is well documented, what isn’t  however is currently available support and services for these children, women and families.  The intern will look at currently literature to contribute to a scoping review before supporting PPI with women who have experience of this to understand what provisions of care and interventions are needed.

It is hoped that the output from this internship will be a stepping stone into a larger PhD project that identifies pertinent factors (personal, social/ cultural, legal and health) to improve our understanding of the needs of women who are at risk of repeated care proceedings following birth.

With future aspirations of developing and testing a service level approach / pathway to meet the needs of pregnant women involved in care proceedings (and particularly those who are subject to repeat proceedings).

Check out BU_research and BU_midwifery for details of the focus groups to please share

Congratulations to Malika Felton for winning best oral presentation at the WiSEAN conference

BU research, conferences, Research Centres, Research news, research staff

BU Programme Lead for BSc (Hons) Sports Therapy, Dr Malika Felon was awarded the prize for Best Oral Presentation at the WiSEAN conference (Women in Sport and Exercise Science Academic Network) at University of Portsmouth in June 2024. This comes after her award of the Early Career Researcher Award at the same conference last year in Liverpool.

Malika presented on behalf of the Reproductive Health and Outdoor Swimming Group, which includes experts from across cold water physiology, exercise physiology, reproductive science, maternal health, obstetrics, neonatology, water epidemiology and representatives from the Open Water Swimming Society and an open-water swimming social enterprise (University of Plymouth, University of Portsmouth, UCL, NHS Trusts, Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Bluetits Chill Swimmers).

The presentation was on the group’s work ‘Cold Water Swimming and Pregnancy: A Scoping Review and Consensus Recommendations’. The work recognises the lack of evidence-based information to answer the many questions women have about cold water swimming during pregnancy. The presentation gained a lot of interest, and the group encourage future research to provide the evidence on which accurate advice can be based, allowing women to make evidence based decisions on whether to continue cold water swimming during pregnancy.

Bournemouth University had a group of eight members of staff travel up the coast to attend the WiSEAN conference, including supporting Megan Chesters, a final year undergraduate student from BSc (Hons) Sports Therapy, present her final year Research Project as a poster presentation.

Dr Malika Felton writes “The WiSEAN conference is a fantastic supportive environment, and I am honoured to be recognised for my work at two conferences in a row.”

“As part of the award I received a signed copy of The Female Body Bible (The Well HQ), which I am very much looking forward to read and has been on my to read list since before it came out. The foreword at the start of the book is ‘For those who want to forge a better future for girls and women everywhere – in sport, in health, in life’. I’m looking forward to being a part of this future, working alongside other amazing researchers in the area of women’s health.”