NIHRDataInsights/HRCSData huggingface dataset:
Title: The turnover rate of formal long-term care staff in the UK
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: This project aims to address the problem of the chronic shortage of long term care workers in the UK. We intend to develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors affecting the retention rate of the care workers, and test it in a series of empirical analysis using secondary data from Skills for Care, which collects detailed information on the care workers as well as their workplaces. Our research has important policy implications as it identifies novel instruments to tackle the urgent issue of retaining highly sought-after long-term care workers.


Research activity codes: 7.3 MANAGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING;8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: (No) Rehabilitation and (no) Redress: Exploring Legal and Experiential Perceptions of ‘Loss’ after Critical Care
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: This research primarily seeks to understand how critical care survivors who do not receive rehabilitation after hospital discharge perceive their loss of a chance to recover optimally. Rehabilitation plays a key role in recovery after time spent receiving critical care, but many patients do not receive this support. This means they may lose a chance to recover to the full extent possible, but this is a loss that is often unrecognised in negligence claims. A series of workshops are proposed to understand a) how critical care survivors feel about this issue, and b) what views other key stakeholders hold. In addition to creating space for this insight, the workshops are intended to establish a knowledge exchange network to inform the direction of future essential research on this subject.


Research activity codes: 7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Hunger and Human Dignity: The politics of hunger courts in South Sudan
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: Hundreds of millions of people remain chronically hungry and famines have not ended. COVID-19 now threatens to increase hunger and its consequences. Extreme hunger does not only threaten life, but it can also remove human dignity from the living and the dead. Vibrant ethnographic work has shown how people living through hunger support each other. However, almost no attention has been paid to the use of courts in times of extreme hunger, nor to the legal construction of norms that shape the relationship between hunger, social responsibility and dignity. This research explores these questions through a study of South Sudanese hunger courts – chiefs’ courts that redistribute food to the hungriest people. Using historical, ethnographic and quantitative methods across four sites in South Sudan, our dominantly South Sudanese team will explore the socio-legal construction of norms of welfare and dignity, as well as social hierarchies and inequities.


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Building project identity in health and social care partnerships
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: The proposed programme is a knowledge exchange project that will allow the applicant to engage with managers, data analysts and front line care professionals who are currently seeking to integrate previously fragmented care services provided by a local authority and an NHS Foundation Trust. This work would allow the applicant to build local capacity for organizational learning and multi-disciplinary team working across previously separate professional jurisdictions. A knowledge-sharing event would showcase insights and benefits from the engagement to an invited audience of policy makers, care professionals, local NHS care commissioners and academics. Outputs from the engagement would include a conference paper that will report initial project findings, managerial learning tools and academic papers that will relate key findings from the engagement to contemporary debates on how care professionals can operate across the fixed boundaries and hierarchies that have long characterised the UK health and social care system.


Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Reconciling medical knowledge communities: learning from the history of Indian plant drugs
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: The intersection between biomedical and traditional medical systems is widely recognised as a major global challenge in health. This project studies the history of communities of knowledge of herbal medicines in India over the last 200 years, bringing fresh evidence to bear on contemporary plant-based healing practices, both in India and in Ayurvedic medicine in the UK. The project compares textual and specimen data, including the unique collection of 3000 historic Indian drug specimens at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and databased textual sources held at the Transdisciplinary University, Bengaluru. Drawing on critical approaches to the history of medicine at the University of Manchester, the project will work both with these datasets and contemporary knowledge holders in medicine, herbal production, and pharmacology to develop a nuanced understanding of historic and current day practices and to consider their relevance to policy relating to herbal medicines and integration of health systems.


Research activity codes: 5.1 PHARMACEUTICALS;5.9 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (TREATMENT DEVELOPMENT)
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Toxic Work: Rethinking the place of diseases and the role of the human body in the global electronics industry
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: This project investigates the place of diseases and the role of the human body in global production. Based on a qualitative and multi-sited methodology, it interrogates the life struggles of workers in the Chinese electronics industry to challenge conventional ideas of production processes. This research provides a critique of scholarship on global production networks and extends theoretical perspectives that conceptualise these globalised systems of production in light of their environmental risks and distributional effects. In particular, the study examines toxicities and diseases as mechanisms for the creation of economic value. In so doing, it rethinks the human body as i) disposable matter, ii) natural landfill, and iii) a transient agent of globalised systems of production. In collaboration with NGOs, the project will also develop a database for learning and advocacy that aims to bring transformations in the electronics industry.


Research activity codes: 2.2 FACTORS RELATING TO PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Care-experienced graduates' decision-making, choices, and destinations: How does a background of care affect graduate transitions?
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: Care-experienced (CE) students overcome profound challenges to access Higher Education (HE), such as educational disruption, and mental health issues arising from childhood trauma. Yet, we know little about their onward trajectories as graduates. Quantitative evidence of CE graduate destinations presents a complex pattern; they are less likely to be employed, though are more likely to move directly into postgraduate study. Dominant theories in the sociology of education would predict a continuation of disadvantage, which only partially exists here. This study will be the first to investigate the reasons underpinning this complexity. Using a qualitative, longitudinal approach, it will explore how CE students negotiate their graduate transitions into employment/postgraduate study. In paying attention to how care histories shape constellations of structural enablements and constraints upon graduation, the study will generate new insights into sociological theories of how inequalities are reproduced (or not), and whether HE helps to transcend early life disadvantages.


Research activity codes: 2.3 PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS;7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: In Another’s Skin: How Embodiment and Context Affect Gender Stereotypes
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: Recent advances in technology have massively increased both the quality and affordability of Virtual Reality (VR) systems increasing its viability as both a novel form of popular entertainment and a research tool for the social sciences. The proposed project will investigate how embodying a character of a different gender in virtual reality interacts with the virtual setting experienced to challenge or entrench stereotypical views. It will consist of a research study that places male participants within a female avatar in either a science lab or domestic kitchen setting. Participants implicit and explicit associations between gender and STEM subjects will be assessed both before and after the virtual experience allowing for an assessment of whether embodying female characters affects stereotypical attitudes. In addition, the proposal will fund a workshop that will draw together academics and workers in immersive media to explore the opportunities and risks of challenging stereotypes via VR.


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES;1.4 METHODOLOGIES AND MEASUREMENTS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Equitable Mobility for City Health and Wellbeing
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: For many East African residents, travel around cities is problematic due to poor walking and cycling infrastructure, traffic congestion leading to long travel times, and exposure to pollution and road safety hazards, all of which impact on people’s health and wellbeing. We will work with vulnerable urban residents (including the poor, disabled, women and children) to understand how their journeys, and the daily challenges and risks they confront, affect health and wellbeing, both psychologically and physically. This will include novel health measurements, journey mapping and storytelling to understand different dimensions of the problem. Our assessments will consider how informal mobility solutions adopted by these groups interact with official transport systems. We will then select particular pressing challenges and work with engineers and vulnerable users to co-design solutions to improve mobility allowing better access to work, education, healthcare and opportunities particularly for vulnerable users to improve their health and wellbeing.


Research activity codes: 7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS;8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: UDY:REP- Uniting Disabled Youth: Research, Empowerment and Participation. Developing a methodology to involve disabled youth in international decision-making forums.
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: Disabled young people (dyp) are often invisible in local, national and international decision-making. This project will address this through an innovative partnership between academia, disabled person-led organisations (DPOs) and dyp across the global south and north. Specifically we will adapt a dyp–led research methodology to meet the cultural/political environment of the global south. This methodology has been successfully used in England by the Children’s Commissioner to develop their submission to the UNCRPD as part of the UK Shadow reporting process. Co-led by English disabled young researchers, we will work in partnership with a DPO in the Philippines to train a group of dyp to gather evidence on the enactment of their rights and its implications for the UN 2030 agenda. Learning from the global south/north will be shared in order to empower dyp to be involved in decision-making at local, national and international levels.


Research activity codes: 7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Caring—With Cities: Enacting More Care-Full Urban Approaches with Community-Led Developments and Policy-Makers
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: Achieving a caring city needs to emerge and be sustained through care-full interfaces between city dwellers and policy-makers. The idea to care—with rather than —about or —for, moves beyond understandings of care as a provision from institutions to individuals, or from individual to individual, which positions the cared—for as passive recipients. This project aims to understand how care is embedded into community-led and policy-led urban development; the interface between the two; and the potential for designing care—with into future urban policy at a systemic level. ‘Participant-researchers’ across 3-5 UK case studies, will undertake organisational and community archival research; in-depth interviews and facilitated group conversations; and a preliminary system mapping of the interface with policy to identify soft infrastructures of care. A more advanced mapping will aid understanding of opportunities for care—with, where these dynamics are already present, suggesting directions for policy design with links to national and international urban policies.


Research activity codes: 3.2 INTERVENTIONS TO ALTER PHYSICAL AND BIOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Youth, Democracy and Sustainable Citizenship: Reimagining the City and Empowering Young People through Engagement with Policy-Makers
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: Cities have been hit by successive waves of crises, from the Great Recession to COVID-19, which have exacerbated inequalities. They have had a particularly negative impact on the everyday lives of marginalised groups (often neglected by policy-makers) with huge repercussions for areas including mental health, housing, crime and the environment. In this project, we examine the views and solutions of one of the most affected groups, young people, in the UK capital. Drawing upon a variety of inter-disciplinary perspectives and using participatory methods to research "with" young people, the project: investigates the views of young Londoners on the issues that affect them and youth civic engagement; and, provides spaces for youth and policy-makers to co-create "sustainable public policy". In the context of COP26 and the UN sustainability agenda, we show how sustainable solutions can work against inequality and exclusion and create good governance: two key ingredients of a "good city".


Research activity codes: 3.2 INTERVENTIONS TO ALTER PHYSICAL AND BIOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Adapting to the ‘New Normal’: Implications for post-COVID-19 Health Communication and Education
Funder: The British Academy

Abstract: Although many countries are lifting restrictions, there remains much uncertainty over how nations will function with the ongoing risks of COVID-19 (or future variants) under a ‘new normal’. This project investigates the likeliness of communities in Japan and the UK adapting to incumbent changes to health policies, guidance, and social etiquettes, given the prospects of new waves of infection, social restrictions, employment requirements, and changes in the availability and distribution of vaccines. This will be facilitated using a mixed methods design, in one region with a relatively low recorded rate of vaccine uptake or confidence, in both Japan and the UK. The design builds on the COVID-19 work of two of the project contributors, on mental anxiety and social contact patterns, respectively. The study considers civic engagement as a driver of vaccine engagement in the new normal, and dovetails with the British Academy’s recommended ‘CLEAR’ principles for policy change.


Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Engineered cells for combined diagnostics and therapeutics (Theranostics)
Funder: Royal Academy of Engineering

Abstract: Most diseases are treated with “one size fits all” systemic therapies which is problematic because the differences between individual patients and constantly changing disease states mean that the timing, location and dosage of administered therapeutics is often suboptimal. To combat this there is an urgent need for a more personalized, customized treatment model. Professor Rosser aims to make a step change in personalized medicine by engineering cells that can simultaneously combine precise diagnosis of a disease with a targeted therapeutic intervention in a closed loop control circuit that prevents the disease developing or provides a cure. The goal would be to have implantable or circulating sentinel cells that could recognize disease related changes and biomarkers, process the information and then produce an appropriate therapeutic molecule (e.g. an antibody or drug) in the correct concentration to treat the disease before it develops or progresses. The ultimate long-term aim is not to just to treat disease but to maintain wellness via implants in healthy populations that prevent the initiation of illness, promoting disease free longevity with the subsequent huge benefits both socially and economically.


Research activity codes: 4.5 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (DETECTION);5.9 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (TREATMENT DEVELOPMENT);6.9 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (TREATMENT EVALUATION)
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Smart materials and mechanisms for ubiquitous soft robotics
Funder: Royal Academy of Engineering

Abstract: This project focusses on a new electro-origami artificial muscle technology that can lift 1000 times its own weight. In addition, Professor Rossiter has demonstrated the technologies underlying the soft robotic Right Trousers, garments which will help elderly people and people with disabilities move more freely and maintain their independence. These have been reported widely, including on BBC News and across the internet, and have been exhibited at the British Science Festival. Professor Rossiter will develop the Right Trousers technologies into wearable assistive and rehabilitative clothing for physiotherapy and self-guided physical recovery at home.


Research activity codes: 1.3 CHEMICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES;2.5 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGIES (AETIOLOGY);5.9 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (TREATMENT DEVELOPMENT)
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Accelerating engineering biology: efficient engineering of reliable and high-performance biosystems
Funder: Royal Academy of Engineering

Abstract: This project will use systems and control engineering techniques to design and implement robust, high-performance biosystems that can perform tasks autonomously and reliably. The resulting biomolecular and cellular systems will have applications in biotechnology, sustainable manufacturing, next-generation therapeutics, and lifelong health and well-being, and will help to transform synthetic biology from an emerging technology to a mature engineering discipline.


Research activity codes: 2.5 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGIES (AETIOLOGY);5.9 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (TREATMENT DEVELOPMENT)
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Computational precision medicine for in silico trials of medical devices
Funder: Royal Academy of Engineering

Abstract: This research will investigate the role of imaging, modelling and simulation as an alternative and complementary method of discovering, developing, and testing new medical devices. Using ‘in-silico’ trials, where computer analysis is used to engineer medical devices from their conception, his research aims to optimise clinical outcomes by designing systems for specific patient groups, and with minimal harm to animals and humans compared with current medical technology trials.


Research activity codes: 5.3 MEDICAL DEVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Multidimensional Target-Agnostic Sensing (MTAS): The next generation of biosensors.
Funder: Royal Academy of Engineering

Abstract: This project aims to develop next generation biosensing technology platforms including a new MTAS (Multidimensional Target Agnostic Sensing) platform. Working closely with clinical and industrial partners, research will enable applications in point-of-care diagnostics, disease profiling and monitoring of biotech processes.


Research activity codes: 2.5 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGIES (AETIOLOGY);4.1 DISCOVERY AND PRECLINICAL TESTING OF MARKERS AND TECHNOLOGIES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: A Clinical AI for Tackling Multimorbidities in Hospitals in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs)
Funder: Royal Academy of Engineering

Abstract: A data-driven ‘clinical AI’ system is proposed for low- and middle- income countries. It will cluster complex patient data to identify phenotypic subgroups and provide personalised early-warning of deterioration in the presence of multimorbidities.


Research activity codes: 4.5 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (DETECTION);8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE
Title: Supporting Young Bradford
Funder: The Health Foundation

Abstract: Adolescence and transition into adulthood are high-risk periods for the onset of mental ill health. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded this risk, dramatically disrupting young people’s lives and intensifying existing social and health inequalities. Emotional support is a vital asset for young people during transitional periods, acting as a buffer to protect their mental wellbeing. However, there is a lack of research exploring the complex factors influencing the level of emotional support that families are able to provide. This project from the Bradford Institute for Health Research aims to explore this issue by investigating the work-life balance of different families in Bradford, a demographically young, multi-ethnic, deprived city with high levels of need. Building on the successful Born in Bradford, Age of Wonder and ActEarly research programmes – which follow the lives of young people growing up in Bradford – the project will investigate how working patterns (including location, hours, shifts, pressures, responsibilities and unemployment) affect the level and quality of emotional support given to 12–15-year-olds. Using an ‘appreciative inquiry’ approach focused on harnessing existing strengths, the research will consider the impact of interacting contextual elements (such as culture, ethnicity, class, area and lasting COVID-19 impact) on the needs of a diverse range of families, from single-parent to multi-generational households. Under the guidance of a community steering group, feedback from local workshops, in-depth family interviews and large-scale surveys of up to 30,000 young people will be used to co-produce actionable policy and practice recommendations on how best to alleviate inequalities and support young people and their families across Bradford.


Research activity codes: 2.3 PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE