In February 2015, in the School of Healthcare Sciences at Cardiff University we launched our new research strategy. The School’s main research webpage can be found here, and for the nuts-and-bolts of our four research themes the links to follow are these:
- Enhancing palliative, emotional and supportive care
- Workforce, innovation and improvement
- Maternal, child and family health and wellbeing
- Repair, re-ablement, rehabilitation and recovery
Meanwhile, in the very near future the School (including its researchers) will be occupying additional floors at our base in Eastgate House. This, for those who know Cardiff, is a building situated at the junction of Newport and City Roads. My office, I think, will move: giving me fine views over the city and beyond.
Here are some photos of the 12th floor, as previously shared via a Tweet:
It is very welcome that we will soon have these new facilities available to us, with the rooms in the photos being used mainly by PhD and Professional Doctorate students.
Which brings me neatly to…
Other interesting developments in the School on the postgraduate research student front are plans to recruit very pro-actively. Research theme members have been busy generating topics for doctoral study, which reflect existing areas of substantive and methodological expertise and where capacity to supervise is known to exist. We’ll be advertising these soon, and inviting potential students to tell us how their plans align. The aim, obviously, is that we grow research in programmatic style by building on established and emerging lines of enquiry. For anyone interested, I’m looking to supervise people who want to use in-depth qualitative methods to examine mental health systems (no surprises there, then!). Specifically, this means projects investigating aspects of: policy; service organisation and delivery; work, roles and values; and user and carer experiences.
Other postdoctoral news includes Mohammad Marie‘s (that’s Dr Mohammad Marie’s) successful defence of his thesis at viva last month. Well done! Mohammad has been supervised by Aled Jones and me, and the title of his thesis is Resilience of nurses who work in community mental health workplaces in West Bank, Palestine. Next up for him are papers for publication: and jolly interesting they’ll be, too.
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