SCHARR - Communicable Research Podcast

In this episode of the SCHARR Communicable Research podcast we discuss the topic of research ethics and in particular how current research aligns with equality, diversity and inclusion practices.

We are joined by Dr Jennifer Burr who is a Senior University Teacher at Sheffield and the Chair of the University Research Ethics Committee (UREC). Jennifer has been leading this work at Sheffield and we will discuss the importance of ED&I as part of research ethics proposals. 

For this episode of the SCHARR Communicable Research podcast, Andy Tattersall is joined by his colleagues Dr Duncan Gillespie and Dr Nick Woodrow alongside Mark O’Brien and Scott Chapman to discuss their collaboration between SCHARR and the North Yorkshire Council Living Well Smokefree Service. 

Smoking remains the largest avoidable cause of premature death and disability in the UK. There are approximately 70,000 smokers within North Yorkshire, with higher rates in areas of greater deprivation, and above national average rates of smoking during pregnancy. This podcast discusses the work and research that has been undertaken to develop and evaluate a ‘hybrid’ stop-smoking service model, where support for people trying to stop smoking is offered in person and remotely.

Welcome to this special, bonus edition of the SCHARR Communicable Research Podcast. Andy Tattersall is joined by a trio of experts from SCHARR to discuss the NHS at 75 and what potentially lies ahead for the organisation in the next 25 years and its 100th birthday in 2048, in relation to healthcare service and the research that supports it.

In this podcast we will discuss the NHS’s priorities for the coming decades and the challenges it faces. Those being a changing demographic, the legacy of Covid, and a quickly evolving technological landscape.

Andy is joined by three academics at SCHARR who all have strong links to the NHS in their roles as a mental health nurse researcher who has previously worked in the NHS frontline services, an emergency care doctor and a GP. Dr Emily Wood, Professor Steve Goodacre and Professor Chris Burton.

Welcome to the latest SCHARR Communicable Research podcast and today we are joined by Dr Jill Carlton who is a Senior Research Fellow at SCHARR within the School of Medicine and Population Health.

Jill joined SCHARR as a research associate in 2005 and conducts research in the development and evaluation of patient reported outcome measures and outcomes research, with a particular focus on quality of life.

 In this podcast we are going to discuss work she has undertaken with colleagues at Sheffield and elsewhere to understand the burden and consequences for people living with diabetes and healthcare systems in general as part of the Hypo-RESOLVE project which is an international collaboration. 

In the latest episode of this podcast series we’ve welcomed back Professor Andrew Lee. Andrew joined SCHARR in 2008 and is a Professor of Public Health. He qualified in medicine from the University of Edinburgh and following paediatric and tropical medicine training went on to work overseas running primary health care and tuberculosis control programmes in Afghanistan. Andrew often describes himself as a boundary spanner and is dual trained in general practice and public health in the UK.

He worked as a Public Health Consultant in Nottingham, and as a director of primary care and population health with the NHS, and as a Consultant in Communicable Disease Control with the Health Protection Agency, Public Health England and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

In addition to his academic role, Andrew is also currently a Senior Consultant in Global Health with the UKHSA as well as Co-Editor-in-Chief for Public Health, a journal of the Royal Society for Public Health.

In this latest episode we look at nutrition as Andy Tattersall is joined by Dr Tanefa Apekey. Tanefa is a registered nutritionist in Public Health and has a PhD in Human Nutrition and MPhil in Food Science. Prior to joining ScHARR, Tanefa worked in the Nutrition and Dietetics team at Leeds Beckett University as a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer and a Reader.

In this latest ScHARR Communicable Research Podcast we are joined by Dr Robert Akparibo from ScHARR and and Professor Richmond Aryeetey from The University of Ghana.

Dr. Robert Akparibo is a Senior University Tutor and Associate Professor in Global Health and Nutrition Epidemiology based within the Section of Public Health, at ScHARR. He is a Registered Nutritionist with the UK Academy for Nutrition and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academic. Over the last few years, Dr Akparibo and his colleagues have been exploring the nutrition transition in Africa with the aim of understanding what drives this. In one area he has investigated the food environment in Ghana and the influences of this on dietary behaviours and practices, and the implication of these behaviours on Non communicable diseases such as diabetes and cancer.

Welcome to the latest episode of the ScHARR Communicable Research Podcast and for this episode we are going to explore the topic of junk food advertisements. To discuss this, we are joined by Dr Penny Breeze and Fran Bernhardt.

Penny joined ScHARR as a PhD student and has been working as a health economics modeller ever since. Penny's research interests are in methods for longitudinal data analysis for the use in decision-analytic modelling. Specifically in complex public health decision problems for obesity and diabetes prevention. Penny co-authored a paper which looked at the health, cost and equity impacts of restrictions on the advertisement of what can be best described as junk foods across the transport for London network. This was a health economic modelling study.

In this episode of the ScHARR Communicable Research podcast Andy Tattersall is joined by Professor Cindy Cooper. Professor Cooper is Director of Sheffield Clinical Trials Research Unit (CTRU) and Professor of Health Services Research and Clinical Trials. We’re going to discuss the challenges of running Randomised Controlled Trials, in particular looking at two studies relating to children, adolescents and people living with dementia . 

Cindy’s research interests include trials methodology, particularly pilot and feasibility studies, psycho-social aspects of long term conditions, evaluation of psychotherapeutic interventions, as well as public and patient involvement in research. Cindy is Chair of three NIHR funded Project Steering Committees and a member of the UKCRC Clinical Trials Unit (CTU) Executive Group. She has extensive experience of designing and implementing evaluations of complex health interventions in large multi-centre trials and other study designs. 

In this latest ScHARR Communicable Research Andy Tattersall is joined by Dr John Richmond and Jeffrey Tochkin to discuss the important topic of health systems and climate change research.

John Richmond is a Lecturer and Programme Director of the MPH in management and leadership,  based in the Public Health group at ScHARR. John earned his PhD in Management from Warwick Business School and completed his Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Operations Management at Warwick evaluating a large-scale quality improvement intervention. During the pandemic John led a pan-Canadian study of healthcare emergency response to Covid-19. John has over 10 years of health management and leadership experience in public and private healthcare in Canada, USA, and UK. John is also one of our other guest’s PhD supervisor.

Rebecca Palmer is a speech and language therapist who specialises in stroke. Rebecca has more than 20 years of experience working in the field of stroke rehabilitation, both in research and clinically in stroke care. She gained a PhD in the treatment of dysarthria using speech recognition technology from the University of Sheffield in 2005. From 2005 to 2010 Rebecca worked as a specialist SLT in the stroke unit at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals.

As part of a HEFCE-NIHR Senior Academic Clinical Lectureship, her focus was on applied clinical research and she was the chief investigator of the Big CACTUS trial investigating the clinical and cost-effectiveness of aphasia computer treatment versus usual stimulation or attention control long-term post-stroke.

In this special edition of the ScHARR Communicable Research Podcast I am joined by Professor John Brazier ahead of his forthcoming retirement from the University of Sheffield.

John is a Professor of Health Economics in the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) and was the first Director of the Economic Evaluation Policy Research Unit, known as EEPRU. This is a joint Sheffield and York Unit funded by the Department of Health and Social Care  in England to undertake applied and methodological research to inform health policy in England.

He has more than 30 years’ experience of conducting economic evaluations of health care interventions for policy makers, with a special interest in the measurement and valuation of health for economic evaluation. He has published over 300 peered reviewed papers.

John is perhaps best known for his work in developing a preference-based measure of health for the SF-36 (SF-6D), and with colleagues has further developed and extended these methods to a number of specific conditions and most recently a new generic measure aimed at capturing health and well-being outcomes in health and social care for service users and their carers (EQ-HWB).

In this latest episode of ScHARR’s Communicable Research Andy Tattersall is joined by Mark Clowes who is a fellow Information Specialist within the school. Mark joined ScHARR in 2015 and is currently focused on information retrieval for systematic reviews.

After completing an MSc in Information Management at the University of Sheffield’s iSchool, Mark specialised as an academic liaison librarian supporting nursing and allied health; originally at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, before moving on to Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Leeds. In 2012 he completed a teaching qualification leading to accreditation as an Associate of the Higher Education Academy.

For this latest episode I am joined by Colin Angus who is a senior research fellow in the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group.

Colin joined ScHARR in 2011 and completed a MSc in Health Economics and Decision Modelling within the department two years later before taking up his current post.

That post involved working on the design, development and adaptation of complex health economic models and their use to appraise key policy questions in the field of alcohol research.

Colin has become well versed in using the data from his research as an effective way of communicating that work. In addition, for the last two years he has shared numerous engaging and insightful posts on social media and through mainstream media in relation to the Covid19 pandemic.

Health inequalities: to what extent are decision-makers and economic evaluations on the same page? Greg Fell talks to Seb Hinde and Dr Matt Franklin

Within this Podcast, Seb Hinde (Health Economist, University of York) and Matt Franklin (Health Economist, University of Sheffield) discuss with Greg Fell (Director of Public Health, Sheffield) the extent to which decision-makers and economic evaluation frameworks are 'on the same page' when it comes to defining and quantifying health inequalities to help inform the commissioning of care services regionally, with a focus on the current care commissioning landscape across health and adult social care within England.

In this latest episode Andy Tattersall takes to the road with his guests Dr Duncan Gillespie and Dr Emma Hock to discuss smoke free campuses whilst walking around the University of Sheffield campus.

Further reading from sources mentioned in the podcast

ScHARR's Communicable Research - Episode 9 - Dr Jaqui Long - Clinically unnecessary’ use of emergency and urgent care

In this latest episode of the ScHARR Communicable Research podcast we are joined by Dr Jaqui Long. Jaqui is a Research Associate in the Health and Care Research Unit and is currently working on the DEUCE study, which aims to understand people's decision-making in relation to use of emergency and urgent care services.

Jaqui Long (Research Associate)

BA Hons, RSHom, PhD

Bio

Jaqui is a Research Associate in the Health and Care Research Unit, and started work here in August 2017. Currently Jaqui is working on the DEUCE study, which aims to understand people's decision-making in relation to use of emergency and urgent care services.

The study has three elements:

1. A realist review to identify what is already known about how people make decisions in relation to use of emergency and urgent care
2. In-depth qualitative interviews and focus groups with selected groups of people to understand their experiences and decisions in seeking this help
3. A national survey to explore people's attitudes towards seeking help from different providers of emergency and urgent care.

Jaqui is mostly involved in the second part of the study, the interviews and focus groups, but is also part of the review team.

Prior to coming to ScHARR, Jaqui was a Research Assistant at De Montfort University in Leicester, working on an NIHR-funded feasibility study to develop and test an intervention to support parents with excessively crying babies.

Jaqui's PhD was in the School of Healthcare at the University of Leeds and was a qualitative exploration of how mindfulness affected people's experiences of living with a long term condition. Jaqui undertook interviews with people with a range of physical and/or mental health problems who had previously learnt mindfulness through the Breathworks 'Living Well with Pain and Illness', particularly exploring people's perspective on how it had changed their thinking and behaviour over the long-term.

Before moving into research, Jaqui worked for many years in the voluntary sector in the recruitment and training of volunteers, and in managing training programmes. Jaqui is also a qualified homeopath and has worked part-time in private practice for over 10 years.

Links to research discussed in this podcast can be accessed via these links:

Survey papers

In this latest episode of ScHARR’s Communicable Research podcast we're joined by Dr Laura Fenton, Professor John Holmes and Dr Abigail Stevely from the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group. In this podcast we’re talking about the topic of alcohol consumption and its decline among young people.

A ScHARR led report funded by the Wellcome Trust from 2018 that was co-authored by Professor Holmes found that young people in England are drinking less. They looked at evidence from multiple surveys that showed a consistent pattern over 10-15 years of reduced participation in drinking, reduced consumption levels among drinkers, reduced prevalence of drunkenness and less positive attitudes towards alcohol.

In this episode we're talking to Suzanne Ablard who works as a Research Associate within the Health Services Research section at ScHARR. Suzanne works in the area of  Emergency Care Research and we discussed the work she is presently involved in looking at Advanced Practitioner roles within the NHS.

in 2014 Suzanne joined the Health Services Research Section of ScHARR and has worked on a number of research studies in the field of Emergency Care Research, including; identifying alternative care pathways for frequent users of the ED and an evaluation of GP services co-located with the ED across Yorkshire and the Humber. Suzanne graduated from the University of Sheffield in 2013 with an MA in Social Research and prior to that was awarded a BSC in Applied Psychology.

Suzanne's research interests involve developing new and innovative pathways of care for patients attending the Emergency Department.

For this episode of ScHARR Communicable Research we are joined by Dr Andrew Lee.

Andrew qualified in medicine from the University of Edinburgh and  following undertaking paediatric and tropical medicine training he then  worked overseas running primary health care and tuberculosis control  programmes in Afghanistan.

Andrew has previously worked as a Public Health Consultant in  Nottingham and as a director of primary care and population health with  the NHS. In addition, Andrew was a consultant in Communicable Disease  Control with Public Health England.

Andrew joined ScHARR in 2008 and is based within the Public Health  section and is a Reader of Global Public Health. He also is the  Co-Editor-in-Chief for Public Health, and Public Health in Practice  journals of the Royal Society for Public Health.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Andrew has been active on  the web across platforms such as Twitter and The Conversation, as well  as other media channels discussing various topics relating to the issue.

This podcast is a discussion as to how Andrew has found the  experience of communicating his expertise and what tips he can share  with those wishing to do the same.

In this episode Andy Tattersall explores the emotive topic of infertility in The Gambia. He is joined by Dr Julie Balen from ScHARR’s Public Health group who is collaborating with Professor Susan Dierickx from the Research Centre of Gender Diversity and Intersectionality based in Belgium. We’ll also hear from Professor Allan Pacey who is an international expert in the field of Andrology and head of department in Oncology and Metabolism at The University of Sheffield.