Measuring and monitoring the safety of care in the home

• Do you want to address an important research question to inform healthcare policy practice?
• Do you want to do cutting-edge research and develop a career in health services or patient safety research?
• Do you want to join vibrant research collaboration focusing on improving the quality and safety of care?

We are inviting applications to commence study for a PhD in the academic year 2024-25 for a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Research Collaboration (PSRC) Scholarship. This prestigious NIHR-funded award provides an exciting opportunity to pursue postgraduate research in health services and patient safety and become a member of the NIHR Academy.

There is growing pressure on acute care capacity and a sustained fall in the number of available NHS beds (The King’s Fund, 2021). The drive to alleviate pressures on bed occupancy in acute care has seen an increase in different delivery models, including healthcare delivery in the home (NHS England, 2023). Consequently, many people with complex and serious conditions, or who are acutely unwell, are now cared for at home by healthcare teams, paid and unpaid carers, and many perform care tasks themselves. Care at home can be cost-effective and beneficial to patients (Levine et al., 2019), however there are unexplored risks involved in the transfer of care to the home and bespoke methods of measuring and monitoring safety have not been developed. Doing so for the home setting will require a different evidence-based approach to those developed for other, more formal settings such as hospitals.

The focus of this PhD will be on establishing an evidence base about how safety in monitored and measured when care is delivered at home and on developing solutions to meet the needs of patients and the health service to safely move the focus of care away from acute settings. To achieve this, you will work in partnership with patients and families and health and social care staff. The anticipated outputs will support patients and carers to be safer in their own home and to address the needs of the health service to move the focus of care away from acute settings. The aims of the PhD are therefore to:

• Understand what measures of safety are currently used or can be adapted to be used when care is delivered at home.
• Establish how safety is created and monitored when care is delivered at home and how this differs to when care is delivered in hospital or residential care settings.
• Understand the risks inherent in the home setting and how care providers understand and manage those risks.
• Create tools to support the management of safety when care is delivered at home.

Methodology

This project is predicted to use a variety of methods and the successful candidate will be supported to develop capabilities in: systematic / scoping literature review, qualitative and quantitative research methods, case study methods and co-design methods.

Intended outcomes

This project will generate knowledge, tools and intervention(s), which will be shared more widely across the academic and healthcare sectors. Findings from the project will be disseminated via conferences and published in peer-reviewed medical journals, thus having the potential to influence other providers of healthcare both nationally and internationally.

This PhD studentship is based in the School of Pharmacy & Medical Sciences and  the successful candidate will be supported by a variety of research groups including the Yorkshire Quality and Safety Research Group based at Bradford Institute for Health Research, the Faculty of Life Sciences Health Society People and Place research theme, and the Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research.

If you would like further information or details about this project, please contact Professor Beth Fylan.

We would like to encourage applications from all backgrounds including the following groups:

1. Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority students
2. Disabled students
3. Female students
4. Care leavers
5. Polar Q1 and Q2 students
6. Refugees given the sanctuary status of the university
7. Estranged students
8. Gypsy, Roma, Traveller students
9. Children from military families, veterans and partners of military personnel.

How to apply

Formal applications can be made via the University of Bradford web site.