Community & Health Research Cafe – 23rd February 2011

The next Research Cafe will be held on 23rd February in MB1007 (Main Building) from 1.00pm to 2.00pm.

If you would like to attend, please register with Markos Klonizakis mklonizakis@lincoln.ac.uk.

Research Café’s aim to help support staff and students involved in health and social care research.  They provide an informal networking opportunity to discuss ongoing research and methods.  Students/staff have an opportunity to present their current research and provide discussion and advice on research methods.

Coffee/Tea will be provided

Community & Health Research Café held on 19 January 2011

The second Community & Health Research Café was held on 19th January in Bridge House, at which Coral Sirdifield presented her PhD research study “Offender Health, What role for the Probation Service”.   

Coral Sirdifield who presented her work at the Research Cafe

Corals presentation can be found here:  Research Cafe Presentation

Fiona Togher, Research Assistant in the School of Health & Social Care attended the Cafe and commented:   “Similarly to the first Café the session provided an excellent opportunity for the audience to learn about a research topic that may be new to them and to secure an increased understanding of aspects of research methodology.

Coral firstly talked about why she had chosen her specific area of study and the research questions that had been generated before moving on to focusing on the methods that had been selected and how the data had been collected.

The audience were not shy in asking questions and offering comments and suggestions which added to the positive atmosphere of the session. As a Master of Clinical Research student myself, I found the presentation fascinating and it certainly provided me with some useful tips for when I come to conduct my own thesis!

Overall the café was really enjoyable and I’m looking forward to the next one already…”

If you would like to attend the next research café, the purpose of which is to provide an opportunity for discussion about research in an informal relaxed friendly environment, please email Markos Klonizakis, mklonizakis@lincoln.ac.uk.   The next Research Café will be held on Wednesday 23rd February in the Main Building, MB1007.

Next Research Forum 9 March 2011

Wednesday 9 March 2011, 1130 – 1400, MC0022, MHT Building, Brayford Campus University of Lincoln

This is a regular quarterly research forum which has been developed through partnership between primary health care (NHS Lincolnshire) and the Community and Health Research Group at the University of Lincoln.  The aim of the forum is to enable NHS staff, university staff and students and others interested in health and social care research to discuss and present research happening in Lincolnshire and update their knowledge of research.

To attend the forum you need to register. Please either print the registration form attached at the following link  Research Forum flyer and registration form and return to: Helen Reece, Research Team, Cross O Cliff, Lincoln LN4 2HN or contact Helen.Reece@lpct.nhs.uk Tel: 01522 513355 Fax: 01522 515365.

Programme

1150-1200

Welcome

Professor Niro Siriwardena, Professor of Primary and Prehospital Health Care & Research Lead, NHS Lincolnshire

1200-1235

Identifying barriers and facilitators to improving pre-hospital care of asthma: views of ambulance clinicians

Debbie Shaw, Clinical Audit & Research & Manager, East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust and Visiting Fellow University of Lincoln

1235-1310

Use of aspirin, NSAIDs and coxibs: New knowledge and new primary care research

Jen Dumbleton, Clinical Trial Coordinator, Nottingham Digestive Diseases Centre and Dr Tony Norman, SpR Gastroenterology

1310-1320 Comfort Break
1320-1400

Getting out of the house after a stroke: a multi-centre randomised controlled trial on going in Lincolnshire

Pip Logan,  Associate Professor in Community Rehabilitation, University of Nottingham

School of Health and Social Care Seminar Series 2010-11 Prof. Margrit Shildrick

This presentation looked at heart transplantation as an exemplary process that potentially disturbs all aspects of modernist bioethics as well as raising concerns about prostheses and human hybridity in general (Shildrick, 2010). .

The paper offered an insight into the way human heart recipients in a North American context are likely to experience psychic disruption to their sense of self as a result of their bodily transformation. Drawing on a mixed method approach of interview and visual methods (video), recipients were able to talk about their feelings about receiving a donor”s heart as well as offer more phenomenological understandings through their body language and affect. The empirical aspects offered often indicated that the emotional descriptions of their identity did not correspond with their body language and emotionality surrounding their heart transplants, which points to the existing bioethical implications of heart transplantation, in this instance, and perhaps other organ transplantation more generally. Margrit Shildrick (2010) argues that the implications have profound ethical implications on 2 levels. From a conventional perspective, results show a clear need to revamp clinic practice to enable recipients to give more open accounts of their actual bodily experiences following transplantation, and indeed to question the limits of what is seen as unproblematically therapeutic. On this level, it seems that the pressure to conform to the ‘grateful for life’ discourse, whilst grappling with, amongst other things, guilt that somebody died, which enabled them to live, obligations that come with receiving a ‘gift,’ the encouragement by clinicians to write letters of gratitude to donor’s families alongside visceral changes in their embodied self were more than the authorized narrative. The authorized  narrative situates the body as a Cartesian machine that is being restored to an originary self. However, the research confirmed that recipients are highly invested in speculating on the identity of donors precisely because they feel that some donor characteristics will carry over, and that almost 80% display distress, either in relation to the donor, to their own identities, or both (Shildrick, 2010). The authorised narrative insists that the replacement of a ‘failed’ organ restores the originary self, but the problem is that the post–transplant body is not only prostheticised, but becomes irreducibly hybrid for life: the originary self is irrecoverable (Shildrick, 2010). Throughout the seminar, Susan Stryker’s famous quotation in relation to transgender surgery kept springing to mind:

“As we rise up from the operating tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals are something more […] than the creatures our makers intended us to be. Though medical techniques for sex reassignment are capable of crafting bodies that satisfy the visual and morphological criteria that generate naturalness as their effect […] Transsexual embodiment, like the embodiment of the monster, places its subject in an unassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to a Nature in which it must necessarily exist” (Stryker, 2006: 248).

On the second level, Shildrick (2010) asks could a better understanding of what it means to incorporate an organic prosthesis mobilise a different approach to a range of biomedical interventions? This would require a move away from a number of ethical paradigms that insist on the Cartesian mind/body split and rethinking Utilitarianism. Both prostheses and transplants show us a destabilisation of the socio-political, legal and ethical categorisation of bodies according to normative epistemologies that create markers such as gender, sex and race (Shildrick, 2010). As the body makes novel connections and participates in assemblages of the organic and inorganic, it demands a reimagination of the ideologies of human identity, and a reconfiguration of bioethics (Shildrick, 2010).

References:

Shildrick, M. (2010). Hybrid bodies and prostheses: the bioethics of identity. Paper presented at the Intersectionality: Theory and Practice for Quality Improvement in Healthcare, School of Health and Social Care Seminar Series 2010-11, University of Lincoln.

Stryker, S. (2006). My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage. In S. Stryker & S. Whittle (Eds.), The Transgender Studies Reader (pp. 244-256). New York: Routledge.

Ian McGonagle presents at first Health Research Café

The research café is an informal environment where new researchers can present their research (at whatever stage it is at), to a peer group of researchers, and where a discussion in a relaxed, friendly environment can help to shape both the presenter and those in the audience views about all things ‘research’.  The first Health Research Café was held on 10th November.

Ian McGonagle at the first Health Research Cafe

And so it was with Ian McGonagle’s presentation to the group on his PhD study ‘The transfer of training from the classroom to the mental health practice setting’.  In his presentation Ian set the context of the research, went through some of the models that influence learning and how he intended to approach his research through the use of questionnaires at various time points in the study.  He explained that he also intends to use 3-5 case studies to examine the transfer of learning from the classroom to the practice setting. 

 Ian McGonagle’s Phd Study

Jo Middlemass, (Research Assistant, School of Health and Social Care) attended the first Research Cafe and commented:  “Not only did the excellent presentation generate a lot of questions and discussion that might help Ian to go forward with his research, but also as an audience participant I came away with an idea of how I could move forward with my own PhD.  

Outstanding, thought-provoking session.  Why don’t you give it a try?”

 FUTURE DATES

All Research Café’s take place between 1.00 and 2.00pm with refreshments available:

–        Wednesday 19th January, Meeting Room, 3rd Floor, Bridge House

–        Wednesday 23rd February, Seminar Room MB1007, Main Building

–        Wednesday 23rd March, Meeting Room, 3rd Floor, Bridge House

–        Wednesday 11th May, Seminar Room MB1007, Main Building 

–        Wednesday 22nd June, 3rd Floor,  Bridge House

If you would like to attend any of these sessions, please book with Natalie Pickles, npickles@lincoln.ac.uk or 01522 837736.