Health Studies Research/ option of joint PhD with HKU or NUS MPhil/PhD

The Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care at King's is a world-leading centre for applied and allied healthcare, clinical research and education. Our focus is on training the healthcare leaders and researchers of the future, with a strong commitment to providing postgraduate programmes of the highest quality.

The faculty offers research programmes at MPhil and PhD level. In preparing students to become knowledgeable and competent researchers, supervision is provided by academic staff with expertise in a wide range of research and clinical areas.

The Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care is regarded as a centre of excellence for nursing and midwifery, achieving high scores in research and teaching quality assessments. The first MPhil/PhD students enrolled in the late 1970s and since then the faculty has expanded steadily its range of high quality graduate education programmes to meet the needs of increasingly well-educated healthcare professionals who wish to continue their education to support and develop their careers.

The purpose of our research is to improve the quality of services and outcomes for patients through studies concerned with individual clinical needs, service delivery and organisation and the wider social and policy context of care, nationally and internationally. Our research work is underpinned by cross cutting principles: engagement with patient and user perspectives, commitment to conceptual and methodological innovation, attention to the policy relevance and practical application of our findings through interventions.

The faculty is an integral partner within King’s Health Partners (KHP) and contributes to the interdisciplinary research centres in supporting and delivering high quality research.

Our results in the latest REF (Research Excellence Framework, the UK’s system for assessing research quality in universities) highlighted the combined strength and impact of applied health research at King’s. Of the 89 submissions made by UK universities to the REF’s Unit of Assessment 3 (UAO3), King’s was 1st for overall research rated 4* (the highest possible mark), 1st for research outputs with 92.1% of outputs being rated 3* or 4*, 1st for impact rated 4* with 86.4% of impact case studies rated 4*, and 1st for Grade Point Average and Power.

Our research activity is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Research Councils and a range of charities. We host a range of nationally competitive fellowships from PhD studentship to post-doctoral level.

PhD Research Projects

PhD projects in the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care become available all year round. Please visit our postgraduate research page, where you can browse through the current opportunities. The faculty is especially interested in receiving applications from students across the globe, who are planning their doctoral research projects in fields that will contribute to the faculty’s research groups, enhance the research culture and align with the faculty’s research strategy.

Joint PhDs - Benefits of collaboration

The Joint PhD is an innovative integrated programme that offers unique opportunities for the very best PhD supervision in an international context. The programme offered provides candidates with the opportunity to divide their PhD study between three prestigious universities (King’s, the University of Hong Kong and the National University of Singapore), enjoying full supervision at both. While supervisions and regular graduate seminars enable students to construct a theoretical, historical and systematic framework for their research, the Joint PhD also organizes international colloquia and workshops at which students can present and discuss their work with peers and academic staff across the institutions involved. The programme builds on an extensive network of existing institutional links, joint teaching experience and collaborative graduate programmes between King’s and our partner universities.

Find out more about our faculty supervisors and research projects.