We invite UK applicants for this fully funded PhD scholarship (NIHR Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Research Collaboration) based in School of Psychology. This is an exciting opportunity to pursue postgraduate research in patient safety and implementation science, with an emphasis on the development and application of theory to reducing low-value safety activities/practices in healthcare.
Do you want to improve the quality and safety of care in the NHS? Do you want to do cutting-edge research with interdisciplinary supervisors and develop a career as a safety scientist? If so, this studentship opportunity will appeal to you.
A full scholarship is available in the School of Psychology. This fully funded PhD scholarship is an exciting opportunity to pursue postgraduate research in patient safety and implementation science, with an emphasis on the development and application of theory to reducing low-value safety activities/practices in healthcare.
We are inviting applications for prospective postgraduate researchers who wish to commence study for a PhD (2024/25). This studentship will be hosted in the NIHR Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Research Collaboration (PSRC).
The award is open to full-time candidates (UK only) who meet the eligibility for a place on a PhD degree at the School of Psychology.
Patient safety remains a persistent worldwide issue across healthcare, despite an explicit policy, practice and research focus since the turn of the century. Over the last 20-30 years, risk management in healthcare has led to the accumulation of policies, rules and safety practices, not all of which are evidence based and which, together, are argued to represent safety clutter (Rae et al., 2018). There have been attempts to identify this clutter and to develop theoretically informed interventions to help to remove, reduce, replace or restrict (Norton and Chambers, 2020) ‘low-value’ safety practices (Halligan et al., 2020; Halligan et al 2023). However, this is challenging without an understanding of which interventions might be most effective and why and how these might change over time.
The aim of this PhD will be to address this gap. This PhD studentship will likely involve a systematic review and/or meta-analysis of studies within and beyond healthcare that have tried to understand/de-implement policies, rules, safety practices and processes and to collate this information to answer questions about what are the fundamental barriers and enablers (behavioural, team, professional, organisational and potentially societal) that impact attempts at de-implementation. Together with a wider review of the existing theoretical literature on reducing or stopping behaviour that exists in other contexts (e.g. behavioural and social science) and related concepts in healthcare (e.g. workarounds, defensive practice, overuse, de-implementation, exnovation), a working conceptual model for de-cluttering safety practices will be developed.
Working with the wider PSRC team, the student will develop and modify the model through application (through data collection and/or data analysis) to at least two test cases of de-implementation in healthcare services (e.g. reducing double-checking of medicines and risk assessments). The studentship might also involve laboratory experiments to test fundamental relationships predicted by the model. Together this empirical work, together with input from an expert panel of key stakeholders will help to refine the model.
This PhD studentship will support a wider programme of work seeking to understand how to reduce the number of ineffective/wasteful safety activities within healthcare services
It is expected that the candidate will develop methodological skills in reviewing evidence, qualitative and/or quantitative skills as well as specialist knowledge in behavioural, safety and implementation science. In addition, they would be supported to develop their network and wider research skills. The student would be expected to shape the full plan for the thesis with support from the supervisory team.