Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
Thank you to those who attended the IMSET launch last week. We hope that you now have a better idea of who we are and what we are aiming to do.
As a follow-up, we will be holding a ‘virtual coffee with IMSET’ on Monday 30th November between 3.00pm and 4.00pm to enable more informal chat and discussion. We do hope you can make it.
Please contact SIA@bournemouth.ac.uk if you’d the meeting details.
BU Visiting Faculty Dr. Emma Pitchforth (Senior Lecturer in Primary Care, University of Exeter) spoke this week at International insights: What can the development of community hospitals in international contexts tell us about their role in healthcare futures?, the first of three UK Community Hospital online seminars. Emma presented our NIHR study on Community Hospitals [1-3].
Community hospitals are a crucial but often neglected part of the health care systems in the UK. Community Hospitals are often very popular with local communities but they often face political challenges. COVID-19 has prompted us to make dramatic changes to way we think about and organise health care. Community hospitals have made a significant contribution to the health and wellbeing during the pandemic. The flexibility, resilience and strong community engagement typical of many community hospitals is being brought to the fore. At this critical time, questions are being asked about the future role of community hospitals and what lessons we can learn from other countries.
The notion of a Community Hospital in the UK is evolving from the traditional model of a local hospital staffed by general practitioners and nurses and serving mainly rural populations. Along with the diversification of models, there is a renewed policy interest in community hospitals and their potential to deliver integrated care. However, there is a need to better understand the role of different models of community hospitals within the wider health economy and an opportunity to learn from experiences of other countries to inform this potential.
There will be two further webinars at lunch time on the 12th and 19th November. You can register using the following link: https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dX8LwdHxQX2-Mf8nlt8nwg .
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health
References:
‘Business strategies and decision making’
This is a research seminar to share the research ideas and plans with three internaitonal universities from UK (BU), Greece, and Japan.
The presenters are PGRs and ECRs with an interdisciplinary themes in the social sciences.
Date: 16 November 9:00am (UK)/11:00am (Greece)/18:00 (Japan) (1.5-2 hours session by ZOOM)
Moderators:
Professor Takuji Takemoto (University of Fukui, Japan)
Professor Jason Papathanasiou (University of Macedonia)
Dr Hiroko Oe (Bournemouth University, UK)
Participants: Students from the universities above will make their presentations on their research projects which are followed by the discussions. All virtual participants are invited for the discussions.
Agenda
Discussants: Dr Yamaoka (The Open University of Japan) Ms Sandy Zhu (BU)
Discussants: Dr Ayane Fujiwara (Nottingham Trent University) and Ms Sandy Zhu (BU)
Discussants: Dr Hiroko Oe (BU) and Dr Ayane Fujiwara (Nottingham Trent University)
This session will provide an opportunity to build a network for ECRs/PGRs by sharing their research ideas and plans from an interdisciplinary perspective. This session will also discuss themes in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as ‘Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure’ and ’Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals’, and also it aligns with BU2025 strategic investment areas (SIAs), Simulation & Visualisation and Assistive Technology.
The BU ECRs, PGRs, and MSc students are welcome to this session.
*For more details, please email to hoe@brounemouth.ac.uk
Today we added to our growing pool of publications on aspects of labour migration in Nepal. The Open Access journal BMC Health Services Research published our paper ‘Accessing health services in India: experiences of seasonal migrants returning to Nepal’ [1]. The paper explores the experiences of returnee Nepali migrants with regard to accessing healthcare and the perspectives of stakeholders in the government, support organizations, and health providers working with migrant workers in India. The paper concludes that Nepali migrants experience difficulties in accessing healthcare in India. Hence the authors recommend partnerships between the Nepali and Indian governments, migrant support organizations and relevant stakeholders such as healthcare providers, government agencies and employers should be strengthened so that this vulnerable population can access the healthcare to which they are entitled.
Three of the authors are based at BU (Dr. Nirmal Aryal, Dr. Pramod Regmi & Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen), whilst Dr. Pratik Adhikary is a BU PhD graduate and Prof. Padam Simkhada, from the University of Huddersfield, is BU Visiting Faculty.This qualitative paper is part of a larger International Organization for Migration research project on ‘Health vulnerabilities of the cross-border migrants from Nepal’ [2].
The authors to acknowledge the continuous support from Green Tara Nepal (GTN) during the field work. This Open Access paper from this FHSS team of researchers on migration and health research related to Nepal is the 19th paper in total on the topic [3-19].
References:
At the beginning of August an update was released by the Health Research Authority with regard to the review of clinical research by undergraduate and master’s students.
The HRA have released a further update – please see below. If you have any queries or concerns please contact Suzy Wignall, Clinical Governance Advisor in Research Development & Support.
‘Back in March the Health Research Authority and devolved administrations announced the decision to stop reviewing applications for individual undergraduate and master’s student projects until further notice while we prioritised the urgent review of COVID-19 studies. This was also due to the significant pressure on the NHS/HSC, limiting its ability to participate in research studies unrelated to COVID-19.
The pause on health and social care research projects for educational purposes has now been extended until September 2021. This decision is in line with national priorities for NHS/HSC to support COVID-19 studies and the restart of clinical trials and studies as well as the continuing pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic. This decision has been taken in collaboration with partners in the devolved administrations.
We are not reviewing applications for individual undergraduate and master’s student research projects until September 2021.
Any students with approved studies are reminded to check with the relevant NHS/HSC organisations locally about whether or not their projects may continue.
We are committed to engaging our stakeholders as part of the development of ongoing guidelines for student research.
To receive updates about student research, please email communications@hra.nhs.uk to sign up.‘
To celebrate the launch of the Bournemouth University Institute of Medical Imaging and Visualisation, and the opening of the MRI Centre in the Bournemouth Gateway Building, we are pleased to launch an MRI pump-priming scheme to support innovative MRI research projects.
The aim of this scheme is to support projects that will lead to competitive external funding applications for MR imaging studies. Applications will therefore be required to demonstrate a clear plan for progressing preliminary studies to grant applications and larger studies.
To register your interest, and receive the application form, please email imiv@bournemouth.ac.uk. The deadline for applications is 13th December 2020.
Last week I sent a reminder email to a health journal in Nepal enquiring about the progress of our submitted manuscript, assuming it had got stuck somewhere in the peer review process. The reply threw me a little and made me realise that some people’s situation is far and far worse than we think. The Nepali editor’s email went:
Dear Professor Edwin
Thank you for your email.
I will update the progress as early as possible.
Stay Safe.
PS: 25% of the medical personnel in the hospital where I am working is infected with COVID-19.
Hope for the positive news.
I immediately replied and told him not to worry and take as long as necessary. It also made me realise that we don’t always put ourselves in the editor’s shoes, even though I am a journal editor myself.
Food for thought!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
I’m the last of the Academic Targeted Research Scheme appointments; I took up my post last month (September) in Health & Science Communication. My home base is in the Faculty of Media & Communication, though my project will span numerous departments across arts and science disciplines.
My research is centred in an interdisciplinary and ubiquitous communication method that can be employed for multiple UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals: interactive digital narrative (IDN). IDNs can be used in schools, GP waiting rooms, on tablets and smartphones; interactivity significantly increases retention, particularly when incorporated into media that audiences voluntarily and eagerly devote attention to. As a practice-based practitioner/researcher composing IDNs and evaluating their efficacy on multiple projects, I aim to develop a model for health and science communication through reading and writing IDNs that can be implemented in a wide array of scenarios and topic areas.
I came to this work through a serendipitous process, as I earned an undergraduate degree in science and did some postgrad study in evolutionary biology. I quickly discovered, however, that I’m more interested in reading and writing about science than I am in doing it (it was a lot of pipetting DNA!), so I changed tack. Amongst various professional endeavours, I started over, culminating in a PhD in Creative Writing and Digital Media.
My research is largely practice-based, as I compose various creative writing experiments in order to explore how new technologies such as hypertext, scripting, and multimodality affect the creative act and artefact. More recently, I have engaged in two Welsh Crucible-supported projects that brought me back to my science roots, combining interactive storytelling and science communication. You and CO2 examines using interactive digital narratives as bibliotherapy and expressive writing to effect positive attitude and behaviour change regarding the current climate crisis.
Likewise, the Infectious Storytelling project explores the efficacy of interactive digital narratives as persuasive media for educating the public about behaviours that lead to antibiotic microbial resistance. This project incorporates practice-based research, medical humanities, archive research, media analysis, ethnographic research in focus groups, and literary and art criticism, and is based on the historical treatment of tuberculosis in art, media, and literature, using insights 
gained from archival research and textual analysis to inform approaches to communicating the importance of proper antibiotic use to patients, farmers, and the general public.
Here at Bournemouth, I’m excited to expand these experiences into a wider “IDNs for SciComm” project. I’m going to be reaching out to colleagues across arts and sciences disciplines at BU, fostering collaborations and new avenues to explore the use of interactive narratives for health and science communication. The aim of this research is to identify and address a number of science and health communication needs through the increasingly ubiquitous digital technology in our lives, including the possibility of ongoing communication about the current COVID-19 pandemic.
If you’re interested in collaborating with me or with others on interdisciplinary arts-science health and science communication, please get in touch!
A systematic review published late last week assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on on-going and new clinical trials and research on a range of diseases [1]. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a series of public health policies, including lock down, that have crippled the healthcare systems of many countries. These measures hugely impact on study participants, care providers, researchers, trial sponsors, and research organizations conducting clinical trials. This pandemic has a substantial impact on the trial sites as they experience difficulty in the continuation of trial activities which eventually hampers the progress of the trial and delays study timelines. Most sites are struggling due to delayed subject enrolment, shortfalls in monitoring, and risks of compromised data integrity, and this situation also has a negative impact on the start of future. Researchers are also concerned regarding the delay or cancellations of trials in the pandemic, which will have financial consequences for research organizations/human resources.
According to one survey, about two-thirds of the respondents have stopped or will soon halt subject enrolment in ongoing clinical trials, one-third halted randomization, and fifty percent of respondents are delaying or planning to delay the studies. Adopting new approaches and understanding the key risk indicators will help managers support trial sites with flexibility and ingenuity. For instance, switching patient site visits to new-trial virtualization, and telemedicine to interact with patients will help manage current clinical trials also beneficial for the post-pandemic era.
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Yesterday the scientific journal Nepal Journal of Epidemiology published in its latest edition a paper co-authored by BU’s Prof. Hamid Bouchacha. The Short Discussion paper ‘Artificial Intelligence and Health in Nepal’ [1] is an interdisciplinary paper written by two chemists, a computer scientist, an epidemiologist, and a social scientist.
The Nepal Journal of Epidemiology is the official journal of the International Nepal Epidemiological Association (INEA). It is freely available as an Open Access journal on the journal’s own website and it is indexed in PubMed and PubMed Central.
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Congratulations to Dr. Jib Acharya on the publication of his latest research paper ‘Exploring Food-Related Barriers and Impact on Preschool-Aged Children in Pokhara, Nepal: A Qualitative Review’ which is based on his PhD research [1]. Dr. Acharya has published several papers [2-3] from his PhD thesis in collaboration with his supervisors, Prof. Jane Murphy, Dr. Martin Hind and Prof, Edwin van Teijlingen.
Congratulations!
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Over the past half year or so BU academics have produced a healthy crop of publications on COVID-19/ corona virus. Searching the word ‘COVID’ today Saturday 5th September, on the university’s repository BURO (Bournemouth University Research Online), resulted in 59 records of publications whilst searching for ‘corona’ gave 48 publications. Removing duplicates, obviously irrelevant papers (e.g. one paper had a co-author called ‘Corona’) and papers published prior to 2020 resulted in a combined total of 66 BU publications. Some papers are obviously focused on COVID-19/corona virus, as the title suggests. 
Others may merely mention corona virus or COVID-19 in the body of the text, perhaps as a reason for delay in the research, as a new opportunity or barrier and so on. A search on Scopus and BRIAN added nine more Bournemouth co-authored papers to the reference list below.
References from BURO & Scopus:
Giousmpasoglou C, Marinakou E, Zopiatis A. 2020. Ο ρόλος των Γενικών Διευθυντών στα ξενοδοχεία 4* και 5* κατά τη διάρκεια της πανδημίας COVID-19: μία έρευνα σε 45 χώρες. Money & Tourism Magazine
Oe, H., 2020. Discussion of digital gaming’s impact on players’ well-being during the COVID-19. arXiv (2005.00594v1 [cs.CY]).
Wallis, R. and Van Raalte, C., 2020a. If industry-oriented degrees are the answer, what are some of the questions? How do students attribute value to their undergraduate experience from the perspective of post-university employment? WONKHE (19 May 2020).
Zhao, X., 2020a. How China’s State Actors Create a “Us vs US” world during Covid-19 Pandemic on Social Media. Media & Communication, 8 (2), 452 – 457.Whilst searching BU Research Blog added a further eight references:
And last, but not least, BU’s PATH project team has produced a comic book to point pregnant women and their families to a collection of trusted online resources The interactive version of the book is here.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH)
Yesterday the Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences published our editorial ‘Public Health is truly interdisciplinary’ [1]. This editorial was largely written to counteract some of the jurisdictional claims made in Nepal by certain people in Public Health. These claims express themselves in arguments around the question whether Public Health is a single academic discipline or profession or whether it is a broad profession comprising many different academic disciplines. There are two quite distinct and opposing views. Some argue that Public Health is a broad-ranging single discipline covering sub-disciplines such as Epidemiology, Management, Public Health Practice, Health Psychology, Medical Statistics, Sociology of Health & Illness and Public Health Medicine. Those who support this argument, typically see: (a) Public Health is the overarching dominant discipline, which brings these sub-disciplines together; and (b) that a true Public Health practitioner amalgamates all these individual elements. Others argue that Public Health is more an overarching world view or interdisciplinary approach for wide-ranging group of professionals and academics [2]. In this view some Public Health professionals are first trained as clinicians, others as psychologists, health economists, health management, statisticians, or demographers, and so on and have later specialised in Public Health.
However, their are people in the field claiming that Public Health is a single discipline that can only /or even best be practice and taught by those with an undergraduate degree in Public Health. Basically suggesting you you need a Public Health degree to practice or teach the discipline. Our editorial argues that this latter view suggests a rather limited understanding of the broad church that is Public Health.
This latest editorial is co-authored by Dr. Sharada P. Wasti in Nepal, Prof. Padam Simkhada, who is based at the University of Huddersfield and BU Visiting Faculty and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH). Both articles listed below are Open Access and free available to readers across the globe.
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The Health Research Authority have launched a new strategy to ensure information about all health and social care research – including COVID-19 research – is made publicly available to benefit patients, researchers and policy makers. The new strategy aims to build on this good practice and make it easy for researchers to be transparent about their work.
You can read the announcement here.
For further information on the strategy itself you can take a look at the dedicated page on the HRA website.
International Webinar on COVID-19 and GLOBAL Health coming Saturday 25 July. This webinar, organized by Mahatma Gandhi University, India, includes speakers from the Middle East, America, Europe and South Asia. Bournemouth University will be represented by Professor Edwin van Teijlingen from the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perintal Health (CMMPH). Please note the advertised times are local Indian time, the event will take place coming Saturday at 8.00 AM UK summer time.
BU authors can now publish open access in 900+ SAGE subscription journals at no extra cost!
The UK Jisc Agreement, open to all UK institutions who are members of the consortium, will run between 2020 and 2022 and includes back dating to the 1st January.
Corresponding authors publishing an article in 900+ subscription journals in the current SAGE Premier package, as well as in the IMechE Journal Collection and the Royal Society of Medicine Collection can now publish open access, free of charge. Eligible journals are those which offer hybrid open access publishing (SAGE Choice).
Please check with Open Access if you are unsure whether your journal is included.
Authors in subscription journals do not need to take any action to benefit from this offer – SAGE will contact all eligible authors to inform them of the Open Access agreement with Jisc and to invite them to the SAGE Open Access Portal to take up the offer as soon as their accepted article has been received into SAGE’s Production department.
Gold open access journals: Corresponding authors publishing an article in a gold open access journal are entitled to a 20% discount on the prevailing article processing charge (APC). This is available on 150+ pure Gold journals a list of which are available here.
Where an author is eligible for more than one discount, discounts cannot be combined but the highest discount available to the author will be automatically applied to the APC due.
Further information on the agreement and gold open access journals can be found here.
If you have any further queries, please email Open Access.
Over 200,000 participants have joined research studies supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Network (CRN) Wessex in the last five years, according to latest figures published by the NIHR CRN.
The NIHR CRN’s 2019/20 annual statistics show that 37,067 participants took part in NIHR CRN Wessex supported research studies in the last financial year, taking the CRN Wessex participant total for the last five years to 222,042.
Patients from 100% of NHS trusts across the Wessex region, which covers Hampshire, Dorset, south Wiltshire and the Isle of Wight, took part in research, demonstrating the opportunities for people to participate, wherever they live and work.
You can read the full article here.
A number of BU-sponsored clinical studies have contributed to this figure, so if you have your own research idea and wish to branch out into the NHS, please get in touch.
The National Institute for Health Research have recently published their statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The NIHR recognise the problem of racism and structural barriers to minority communities in the research system and have vowed to do more to change this, both in the research landscape and their own organisation.
You can read the statement here.
BU staff can login below:
Applications are now open for 2025 ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowships!
Horizon Europe – ERC CoG and MSCA SE webinars
ERC grants – series of webinars Horizon Europe – ERC CoG and MSCA SE webinars
MaGMap: Mass Grave Mapping ERC grants – series of webinars
Last reminder – MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 internal deadline next week MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 – internal deadline approaching
Research Information Network
Sonamoni project field visit
Register to attend | The 16th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference
ADRC Launches Online Seminar Series