Tagged / health and wellbeing

New GCRF-funded study in South Asia

Featured, international, Research news, Uncategorized

A new multidisciplinary project in South Asia, run between two of Bournemouth University’s Faculties, has recently been funded.  The cross-faculty project “Scoping Study to understand the maternal health, ageing and wellness in rural India to develop a grass-root centre addressing these issues” has Dr Shanti Shanker (Psychology) as its principal investigator in collaboration with Prof Edwin van Teijlingen (Human Sciences & Public Health).   These BU lead researchers have been working in India and Nepal for more than a decade.

This project was recently awarded £76k from the HEFCE GCRF (Higher Education Funding Council for England, Global Challenge Research Funds) Call, at Bournemouth University.  The project will be running from 2017 to 2021 between Maharashtra, India, Nepal and the UK.  This important research initiative  aligns closely with Bournemouth University’s strategic plan around South Asia through Connect India.  Connect India is BU’s hub of practice which focuses on the world’s most populated areas and a global region which is developing rapidly in many ways.

Humanising Care, Health and Wellbeing Conference: 21st & 22nd June

conferences, Events, PG research

This is our fourth conference and due to huge success in the past years we would like to invite you to take part in this year’s conference which will take on the 21st & 22nd June 2018 at the Executive Business Centre in Lansdowne.

We have developed a philosophically driven approach to caring, health and wellbeing based on Humanising practices. It is based on existential understandings from lifeworld approaches and focuses on what make us feel human. Humanising practices (please click to read more) are those that incorporate fully human knowing and support a sense of connection and wellbeing.

This approach is supported by working practices which encourage connection to personal experience and research approaches which privilege subjective experience and knowing; such as phenomenology, narrative, auto-ethnography, embodied knowing and arts–based approaches.

For more information and tickets please visit:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/humanising-care-health-wellbeing-tickets-45585595744#tickets

Tickets include refreshments and lunch.

 

BU Briefing – Inattention, working memory and goal neglect regarding ADHD

BU research

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

For many years Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) was thought to be a disorder exclusive to childhood, and has only recently been recognised as existing in adults. Around 6% of adults have the classic ADHD symptom of inattention and have difficulty concentrating, remembering things and organisation.

This paper examines whether inattention may be linked with problems in the brain system which co-ordinate Working Memory (WM). WM allows you to hold information in your mind while either manipulating the information, or doing something else at the same time. It is essential to build a stable mental ‘task model’ to complete tasks at home, work or study.

Using the Conners Adult ADHD rating scale, adults aged 18–35 were assessed for ADHD symptoms and completed tasks designed to tap verbal and spatial aspects of WM.

Click here to read the briefing paper.

For more information about the research, contact Dr Emili Balaguer-Ballester at eb-ballester@bournemouth.ac.uk or Dr Ben Parris at bparris@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Supporting you to support students: a survey

BU research, Centre for Excellence in Learning, Research news

As part of the Fair Access Research project we would like academic staff to complete this survey to help us understand how students are supported at BU. The area we are focusing on is support for students’ health and wellbeing, as this is becoming increasingly important for students and staff in universities. Your responses to the survey will help us find ways to support you in supporting students to succeed at BU.

hands

Questions of access to higher education do not end (or start) at the university gates. Widening participation involves an engagement with long and complex cycles of learning.

The Fair Access Research project seeks to understand the experiences of students from different backgrounds in order to develop practical solutions to enhance outcomes and maximise opportunities. This includes understanding how students are supported at BU.

In the words of Vincent Tinto: “Access without support is not opportunity”. If we are committed to opening up higher education, we must be committed to supporting all students to succeed across the university learning journey.

A recent survey by the NUS found that 78 per cent of students said they experienced mental health issues over the last year. More than half of the students said that they sought no support.

In a report to HEFCE by the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) and Researching Equity, Access and Partnership (REAP) it was found that students with mental health and social/communicative impairments (such as autism) have doubled since 2008-09. These significant increases are impacting the structures of support that institutions have in place, including academic support

Living with challenging health and wellbeing needs, and not always seeking support, shapes whether or not you stay and impacts upon attainment. It re-orients (or, perhaps, disorients) your whole student experience. And that includes your interactions with academic staff.

With all this in mind, we are surveying academic staff to find out more about how they understand their role in supporting students’ health and wellbeing.

We have developed a short survey for you all to complete. It should take no more than 10 minutes to complete and we hope that it will lead us to develop ways to support you with your students:

To complete the survey click here

Please complete the survey and share with your colleagues from across the university. Your responses will help us to find ways to support you to better support your students, particularly those most in need.

If you want any more information about the survey please email Alex on awardrop@bournemouth.ac.uk

For more information about the Fair Access Research project please email the Principal Investigators, Dr Vanessa Heaslip (vheaslip@bournemouth.ac.uk) and Dr Clive Hunt (chunt@bournemouth.ac.uk)

Call for research proposals – Defence Medical Sciences

Funding opportunities

New SBRI call – Up to £500k of funding is available for this Phase 1 competition.

MOD’s Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) are launching a call for research proposals to identify new and innovative science and technology to enhance the level of military medical care and support to service personnel.

This CDE competition aims to promote military resilience and preparedness through:

Challenge 1. Technologies for health surveillance

Predicting injury, infection or disease in a military population on operations helps maintain fighting ability. This challenge seeks to identify areas of physiology and biochemical pathways that, with new surveillance and analysis technology, can provide novel ways of assessing health and wellbeing.

Challenge 2.  Advanced medical systems for field care

Post-Afghanistan, operational medicine will evolve. Future medical capability will rely on smart, innovative, less logistically intense ways of diagnosing and treating medical emergencies. This challenge seeks innovative technologies that can be used routinely by non-specialists in an operational setting to diagnose the cause and severity of injury or illness and assist in providing care.

A free briefing event will take place at the CDE Tuesday 30 September 2014 in Scotland.

Further details can be accessed via the website.