NIHRDataInsights/HRCSData huggingface dataset:
Title: Characterising novel genetic causes of growth failure
Funder: Barts Charity

Abstract: Severe short stature (SS) causes many psychological and physical disadvantages. A genetic diagnosis ends uncertainty, prevents unnecessary investigation, enables timely initiation of treatment and genetic counselling. Public engagement activities emphasise that a genetic diagnosis is of paramount importance to parents and patients with SS. The Centre for Endocrinology at the William Harvey Research Institute has an established international reputation for genetic testing undiagnosed SS patients. This fellowship investigates several novel changes identified in 3 key genes which lead to growth failure in children. The work will lead to diagnosis for more patients and improve understanding of the pathways and mechanisms involved in growth disorders and other related conditions. Enhanced knowledge will allow the development of new therapies and potentially transform the diagnosis and treatment of patients with growth failure.


Research activity codes: 2.1 BIOLOGICAL AND ENDOGENOUS FACTORS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: MA Medical History and Humanities
Funder: Wellcome Trust

Abstract: The MA in Medical History and Humanities is an interdisciplinary course jointly run by the Departments of History and English, which draws strength from the range of expertise located in both departments. It is open to people with backgrounds in other humanities disciplines, as well as those with social science, science and public health backgrounds with an interest in the medical humanities. The course is shaped by cutting-edge international research spanning the fields of medical history, literary study, sociology, philosophy, health sciences and policy. Students can explore historical, literary, social and cultural perspectives on illness and health, general well-being, issues of public health and the history of medicine. They also examine the links between history, the humanities and policy to gain advanced skills in analysis and critical reflection. Students take a core module which introduces key concepts, methods and debates in medical history and humanities. A strong programme of option modules are offered with students choosing from a range of topics in medical history, the humanities and beyond. Research training also provides essential grounding in graduate-level research skills: selecting research topics, large-scale project management, locating secondary and primary materials, storing and ordering findings and presentation techniques.


Research activity codes: 8.3 POLICY, ETHICS AND RESEARCH GOVERNANCE
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: How effective are “Community Approaches” at protecting and improving health and well-being and reducing inequalities
Funder: Wellcome Trust

Abstract: The NHS England Long Term Plan includes a commitment to champion ‘community approaches’ which aim to improve health and reduce demand on formal care services. Community approaches consist of two main elements: 1. Social Prescribing - general practitioner referrals to local, non-clinical services to give them access to support in areas like employment, debt and physical activity. 2. Community assets - collective resources which individuals and communities have access to, like voluntary and community groups. Aims 3. To what extent and in what populations would addressing debt improve health and reduce care utilisation? 4. To determine if there are inequalities in access to community assets, in terms of concentration and distance. If so, do these inequalities affect health and care utilisation? 5. To assess the effectiveness of a rollout of a social prescribing scheme at improving health and well-being in Greater Manchester. The three aims will be achieved by applying econometric analysis to a combination of nationally representative datasets and a novel Greater Manchester specific dataset. The results will be used to inform policy makers of the effectiveness of community approaches.

Lay abstract: The latest NHS strategy document promises to roll-out a national programme of ‘community approaches’ to improving health and reducing demand on formal health care services. These community approaches include two main elements: Social Prescribing - general practitioner referrals to local, non-clinical services to provide support in areas like employment, debt and physical activity. Community assets - collective resources such as voluntary and community groups. However, we do not know how effective these approaches are and whether they will change inequalities between rich and poor areas. For example, social prescribing schemes will refer people to services to help with financial debt which is a key problem in poor areas. I will use several different datasets and statistical techniques to estimate the effects of community approaches. I will do this using programmes and data from Greater Manchester and the whole of England.

Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Master's History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Funder: Wellcome Trust

Abstract: Since our inception in 1986, CHSTM has pioneered the integrated historical study of science, technology and medicine, arguing that in the modern world these fields cannot be understood in isolation from each other or from their wider social and cultural contexts. Health and medicine are at the forefront of our research activity, initially supported through the Wellcome Unit for History of Medicine (1986-2006) and more recently through a portfolio of PI-led research projects. Our Master’s in History of Science, Technology and Medicine (HSTM) is built around research-led teaching. Students are embedded in a rich research culture with opportunity to participate in a range of academic meetings, seminars, and conferences, as well as contribute to varied public engagement activities built around current research streams. All our research PIs contribute taught elements to the Master's programme and supervise student research projects. This ensures our teaching remains at the cutting edge of the field. A distinctive feature of the programme is that it attracts first class students with undergraduate backgrounds in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Each cohort thereby reinforces in practice the conceptual claim that the medical and health related humanities and sciences are strongest when in dialogue.


Research activity codes: 1.5 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (UNDERPINNING)
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Using linked electronic health data to improve eczema diagnosis and outcomes
Funder: Wellcome Trust

Abstract: Eczema effects 10% of adults. Despite this, and although eczema is visible, there is limited public awareness of either the existence of eczema in adults or its effects on the individual. This awareness includes the impact of eczema on a person’s physical and mental health, social lives, educational attainment and economic prosperity. In this project I will engage with adults with and without eczema in a highly interactive way to understand why adult eczema remains an “invisible visible” disease and how people perceive the impact of eczema on health and social outcomes in the long-term. This programme of work will involve six workshops around the UK using digital storytelling, art and photography to tell real stories and start conversations about eczema. Stories from the workshops will drive the content for a theatre production about eczema. The digital storytelling and art will be added to an interactive, curated website to broaden and continue the discussion around the socio-cultural aspects of adult eczema. Using a variety of creative and engaging approaches, these activities will develop a discussion about the broader consequences of having eczema, including increasing awareness and changing perceptions amongst those with and without eczema. This public engagement work will enrich research conducted in my Wellcome fellowship, using electronic health records to answer questions about long-term outcomes in eczema by understanding impacts beyond health outcomes that would present for medical attention. It will also help me and my attendees understand barriers to visibility and awareness of eczema amongst adults.


Research activity codes: 7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: MSc Public Health
Funder: Wellcome Trust

Abstract: This MSc covers the whole breadth of public health, encompassing high-, middle- and low-income countries. The aim of the programme – consistent with LSHTM’s mission to improve health worldwide – is to provide students with the knowledge and skills necessary to improve the health of populations, communities and particular groups within them. The emphasis is on the use, development and critical evaluation of conceptual models, evidence and methods of analysis, and on effective interventions and policies at local, national and international levels. On successful completion of the programme, students will receive a Master's degree in Public Health. Students can follow a general public health course or concentrate on one of five more specific streams: environment and health; health economics; health promotion; health services management; health services research. In addition to choosing a stream, students holding the Wellcome Trust Studentship will follow a humanities and social science ‘pathway’ through the programme. This will involve taking specialist modules in humanities and social science subjects (such as history, anthropology and sociology) and producing a dissertation rooted in one of these disciplines. The students will be guided along this pathway by a personal tutor with a background in the humanities or social sciences.


Research activity codes: 3.1 PRIMARY PREVENTION INTERVENTIONS TO MODIFY BEHAVIOURS OR PROMOTE WELL-BEING
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Humour and polemic in UK disability arts and its institutions, 1976-2010
Funder: Wellcome Trust

Abstract: This practice-led project, from a disabled artist-researcher, investigates humour as a form of activism within the UK Disability Arts Movement. Focusing on the under-researched National Disability Arts Collection and Archives, it will document the emergence and uses of critical or polemical humour between 1976 and 2010. This archival research, supported by conversations with the movement’s artists, will combine object-orientated creative practice and sensory enthnography with historiographical research. Art history has neglected these artists, who created institutions essential to UK arts today. Overlooked by disability studies too, their transgressive humour critically engaged with changing ideas of disability. For the medical humanities, the research will create new knowledge of how disabled people have driven and understood changing ideas of disability. For critical medical humanities, this project will offer a new paradigm of disability arts research, specifically addressing the significance of the disabled artist-subject as researcher. At a time when the experience of disability in the UK is increasingly individualised, understanding this humour’s agency, collectivity and its effectiveness in disability activism is urgent. This study will inform arts policy, re-position disability activism within art history, and inform critical understanding of how ideas of disability are influenced and understood by disabled people.

Lay abstract: My research will investigate humour as a form of activism, a key strategy in the UK Disability Arts Movement. Art history and disability studies have neglected these artists, who created institutions essential to UK arts today, while engaging with the complexity of changing ideas and definitions of disability through the period 1976-2010, as documented in the under-researched National Disability Arts Collection and Archives. Drawing on this archive and supported by interviews with the movement’s artists, my interdisciplinary project will combine historiographical research with sensory ethnography and object-orientated creative practice. A study of this polemical humour’s collectivity and its tactical use in disability activism is urgent at a time when the experience of disability is increasingly individualised. This project will inform social policy for disability arts, re-position disability activism within art history, and inform critical understanding of how ideas of disability are influenced and understood by disabled people and disabled communities.

Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Temporalities in Tension: Rethinking Healthcare Provisions for Sexual Migrants
Funder: Wellcome Trust

Abstract: This work responds to a growing volume of research on the wellbeing of "sexual migrants." Little attention has been paid to defining "migration" in this literature, which is often understood in a purely spatial sense. In this project, I claim that sexual migrants – whether from the UK or abroad – traverse temporal, as well as spatial, boundaries. This, I claim, has important implications for sexual wellbeing and risk. Through ethnographic research in a London sexual health clinic, including two sets of 15 semi-structured interviews with service users and ten interviews with clinic staff, I seek to uncover the extent to which abrupt shifts between timelines, such as "coming out of the closet," transitioning, or moving to radically new environments such as halls of residence or retirement homes, contribute to sexual risk. This research will problematise racist and imperialist geographies of risk that locate risk in faraway lands, while also bringing to light corrective measures that will improve patient experiences and health outcomes of "temporal migrants," from wherever they originate. These measures include a recalibration of eligibility criteria for targeted risk reduction interventions and an identification of further training needs for sexual health staff working with "temporal migrants."

Lay abstract: There has been a growing volume of research in recent years on the wellbeing of “sexual migrants,” that is, individuals who migrate to more freely express their gender and/or sexual identity. However, little attention has been paid to defining “migration” in this literature, which is often understood in a purely spatial sense. In this project, I claim that sexual migrants – whether from the UK or abroad – traverse temporal, as well as spatial, boundaries, and that sexual wellbeing and risk cannot be holistically understood without taking these temporal migrations into account. Through ethnographic research in a London sexual health clinic, I seek to uncover the extent to which abrupt shifts between timelines, such as “coming out of the closet” or transitioning, contribute to sexual risk. This research will have several policy implications, including the identification of measures aimed at increasing the uptake of sexual health services by “temporal migrants.”

Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: An ethical investigation into environmental sustainability in healthcare.
Funder: Wellcome Trust

Abstract: Healthcare as an industry is one of the most environmentally destructive on earth in almost every respect (e.g. energy use, harmful gas emissions, and physical waste). The enormous environmental toll of delivering healthcare is fundamentally at odds with healthcare's goal of improving health and wellbeing. Indeed, it is the drive to achieve healthcare excellence with world class medical safety and effective treatments that is ultimately so resource intensive and polluting. This project aims to address the dilemma of how to ethically make medical decisions that adequately account for patients and the environment. In particular, I am interested in how we can ethically make trade offs between what is owed to individuals, collective groups, and future generations. For example, what might be best for the treatment of an individual may harm the environment and be detrimental to collective society or future generations. What is the best course of action? I use these three groups as lenses to examine three case studies of areas of environmental concern in medicine: the environmental cost of medical treatments; medical waste production; and the environmental benefits of remote treatment. My findings aim to inform this cutting edge area of applied ethics, healthcare policy and practice.

Lay abstract: The aim of healthcare is to improve and sustain the health of society. However, healthcare as an industry is one of the most environmentally destructive on earth. For example, in the UK there is an estimated 40000 air pollution related deaths each year. The environmental impact of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) is directly at odds with its goal of keeping the population healthy. In this project I address the following problem: what is the most ethical way to make medical decisions that involve accounting for the care of patients and the environment. I plan to investigate how we should ethically account for our decision-making in relation to the administration of medical treatments, the production of medical waste (physical and gas emissions) and remote treatment. The intended impact is to provide guidance to the NHS (and healthcare more broadly) on the most ethical approach to sustainability.

Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Exploring ‘the domestic’ in contemporary hospice architecture: a critical examination of the architecture and design of in-patient palliative care facilities in England
Funder: Wellcome Trust

Abstract: This project proposes a new critical study of English hospice architecture, aimed at making evidence-based recommendations for inclusive hospice design. Although 40 million people need palliative care worldwide annually, relatively little research has examined the settings in which palliative care is administered or attempted to understand how patients, visitors and staff experience them. The widespread tendency in contemporary hospice architecture to make palliative care settings resemble domestic residences is rarely interrogated, despite potential problems surrounding the home’s complexity and the question of whose home is being imitated. A better understanding of hospice architecture is needed to establish how to design hospices inclusively for individuals from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, especially given documented disadvantage in access for some groups.This project will employ an interdisciplinary methodology, examining English palliative care facilities through site visits and analysis of primary documents, and exploring how individuals experience these environments through ethnographic field work, including observation, interviews and focus groups.This study will provide a novel examination of English hospice architecture, highlighting the voices of the users of palliative care settings. Findings will be synthesised into recommendations for policy makers on how to address the issue of domestic design inclusively in palliative care settings.

Lay abstract: Although 40 million people worldwide need palliative care annually, there is a lack of understanding about how the architecture and design of palliative care environments helps or hinders this care. I will conduct a new critical examination of English hospice architecture and explore how palliative care design affects the experiences of patients, visitors and staff. I will consider attempts to make hospices “homelike”, questioning whose homes they resemble, and explore whether certain designs contribute to some groups feeling excluded. I will examine the architecture and design of palliative care facilities by visiting them in person and by studying primary documents about hospice design. In two facilities I will conduct field work, observing and interviewing patients, visitors and staff. This research will provide insights for policy makers about how to design inclusive palliative care buildings which meet the specific needs of those receiving and giving palliative care.

Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: A Policy Evaluation of the Integration of Health and Social Care in Greater Manchester
Funder: Wellcome Trust

Abstract: This mixed-methods project will treat Greater Manchester’s integrated budget in 2016 and the delayed roll-out of Integrated Care Systems across the country as a quasi-natural experiment. I will use a nested-analysis method with qualitative research and three ‘diverse' cases studies will be chosen non-randomly to understand how each Local Care Organisation are specifying their policy delivery according to different population needs. The hypotheses from the small-n analysis will then be tested by further large-n analyses. My research will use advanced methods in order to isolate causal effects of the intervention of integrated care in Greater Manchester. I will use synthetic control methods to create a synthetic counterfactual trend of Greater Manchester if it had much less developed health and social care integration. My synthetic control will be developed from weighted trends from other city-region combined authorities in England. This method is an alternative to traditional methods such as difference-in-differences. This research is interested in the consequences of integrating healthcare at a city-region geography on population health outcomes, this project hopes to understand whether this policy trend is likely to induce new inequalities into the health system, tackle those already in place, or both.

Lay abstract: I will research the consequences of integrating health and social care in England in 2016. This research is interested in the health outcomes for residents in a city-region which has devolved governance and delivery systems in place to localise and integrate health and social care responsibility. I intend to use a mixed-methods research design that will evaluate some of the outcomes of integrated care by focusing on the most developed case: the Greater Manchester model. My primary research question is: “Has the integration of a health and social care budget in Greater Manchester increased health inequalities, decreased health inequalities, or both?” This research will indicate whether there are ‘devolution differences’ available to English city-regions and also the impact of integrating care services on population health and geographic inequality.

Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE