Round 5 of the NIHR Pre-Doctoral Clinical and Practitioner Academic Fellowship has come to an end and we have partnered with the NIHR again this year to support fellowship applications for pharmacists.
We are delighted to share the news that of the four applications received to the NIHR-PRUK PCAF partnership, all four will be funded by the scheme. We have extended the scope of our financial support to ensure we can part-fund as many of the applications as possible.
We are pleased to share that the following pharmacists will be receiving funding through this scheme:
Joanne Crook
Children who receive liver transplants are required to take life-long immunosuppressants. In practice we see many children who do not take their medication as prescribed. This can ultimately lead to graft failure and in some cases premature death. As a pharmacist, within the unit, a daily challenge is to identify and support families with known adherence issues in an acceptable way, including those from diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds and effective for healthcare staff within a busy clinical environment. The project aim is to validate an adapted co-designed child and parent/carer friendly adherence screener in paediatric liver transplant patients and their families, in order to further develop and evaluate appropriate adherence support within a PhD.
Dayana El Nsouli
The GPhC announced changes to the MPharm to allow pharmacists to qualify as Independent Prescribers (IP) by 2026. This change is a catalyst for academia to re-evaluate curricula. I am interested in researching the effectiveness of competency-based education during the MPharm, specifically MDT simulation, and the transfer of learning to the workplace within the context of prescribing. The overall aim of my research is to develop and refine a complex intervention with components required for a multi-disciplinary simulation activity to make the transfer of learning into the workplace effective.
Robert Oakley
My informed interest for the PCAF/PhD proposal, is in reducing inter-patient variability in therapeutic response to vancomycin and associated acute-kidney-injury (AKI) in ICU patients. I hypothesise that the vancomycin ‘area-under-the-blood-concentration-curve’ (AUC) TDM methodology is superior to ‘blood-trough-concentration’ TDM. I also envisage that AUC TDM data can be statistically manipulated to problem-solve identified variability issues through TDM personalisation. As part of the PCAF, a part-time MSc in Translational Medicine, provides me with a foundation in relevant programming/population-statistics/antimicrobial-personalisation/research training. This will equip me with the skills needed to design a PhD proposal consisting of a multicentre definitive study and TDM statistical model development.
We are proud to be committing up to £44,000 towards these fellowship applications as part of the partnership with the NIHR. We are also thrilled to announce that the NIHR will be fully funding the following fellowship proposal:
Orlagh McGarrity
Many interventions at specialist children’s hospitals predispose patients to infection, so, are therefore threatened by antimicrobial resistance. With limited new antimicrobials coming to market and scarcely any with paediatric license there is an urgent need to preserve and optimise the use of existing antimicrobial agents and ensure new agents are available for use in children. Key questions are therefore: How do we dose new antimicrobials in children? How to optimise the dose, combination, and duration of existing treatments? How do we ensure prescribing guidelines are followed? I aspire to be an expert paediatric antimicrobial consultant pharmacist within clinical academia and answer these questions.
We are thrilled to be working with NIHR to fund these awards as we believe in both the great importance of pharmacy research, and of pharmacists being able to add their unique perspective to the research literature on so many important healthcare issues. Our partnership with the NIHR reflects our long-standing commitment to ensure pharmacists have the opportunities to build and expand their research skills and capabilities, in the interest of addressing future healthcare challenges.
The administration of these awards will be managed by NIHR and Pharmacy Research UK looks forward to working with them and the successful fellowship holders to share further updates.
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