Experiencing the Body Multiple: Representations from Patients and Health Professionals.

Bridging the Divide: Living with Multimorbidities

To celebrate the University's research successes, the University of Hull is offering a full-time UK/EU/International PhD Scholarship for candidates applying for each of the following projects as part of a new research cluster.

Studentships will start on 16th September 2019

Interested applicants should contact Professor Liz Walker (Project Lead) ([Email Address Removed]) for additional details.

Summary of Cluster
The aim of this interdisciplinary cluster is to develop an understanding of Multimorbidity (MMB) through determining the ‘lived experience’ of MMB, which is essential to advance patient care, improve the education of health and social care professionals and ensure the effective use of increasingly limited resources. Research, all too often, shies away from the ‘messy reality’ of living with multiple medical conditions. It is not uncommon, for example, to exclude people living with MMB from clinical trials, or to prioritise one condition over another to the detriment of understanding the collective interaction of comorbidities. This research cluster prioritises the collection of voices of people living with MMB and their families and carers.

The research team will adopt an ecological perspective that focuses on the whole person and their various support networks, recognising the importance of family carers as well as health practitioners. The cluster will draw on the collaborative and collective practice, diverse expertise and research experience of the team in gathering and understanding people’s stories and narratives around illness, long-term conditions (LTCs) and, crucially, their intersection.

You will join an interdisciplinary research team based in Faculty of Health Sciences (https://sparchull.wordpress.com/) where we have a vibrant student network (supported by the Institute of Clinical and Applied Research) which is committed to supporting your personal and professional development.

Summary of PhD Project
Experiencing the Body Multiple: Representations from Patients and Health Professionals.
In the process of coming to manage a multiplicity of conditions, a person’s embodied self can become fractured, constituting a ‘patchwork patient’ (Mol, 2002); one whom is required to understand, navigate and manage the complexities of multiple clinical specialisms that are inevitably implicated in the care of a person living with long-term conditions. It is difficult, in this context, for the clinicians who support them and who work within a single disease framework, to see the patient as a recognisably ‘whole’ and embodied person.

This project seeks to purposefully reconstitute and explore the embodied experience of living with multiple long-term conditions, employing an arts-based approach to focus attention on the ways in which people represent and understand their embodied experience of illness. We are interested to understand how ‘bodies’ are managed both clinically and personally in this context and how patients make sense of their own embodiment in increasingly resource limited clinical settings.

The PhD will constitute two strands of investigation, linked by the concept of embodiment:

• First, the study will focus on the variety of ways in which the embodied ‘person’ is variously deconstructed, becoming ,in the process, the disembodied ‘patient’, shifting, semantically, from personhood to patienthood through a variety of clinical activities and processes.

• The second strand focuses on patients’ representations of multimorbidity through an arts-based approach which will enable patients themselves to chart their individual representations of their condition, its impacts and outcomes.

Project Team: Dr Liz Price, Dr Lesley Glover, Professor Liz Walker

Applicants for all projects should have a 1st class undergraduate degree and Masters level qualification in health, social work or a social science discipline, together with relevant research experience. A 2:1 may be considered, if combined with relevant experience.

Applicants will be required to submit a research proposal (approx. 1500-2000 words) with their application. Within each scholarship there is scope to develop the project in accordance with an individual applicant’s disciplinary interests and experience.

To apply for these Scholarships please click on the link below.

https://www.hull.ac.uk/choose-hull/study-at-hull/admissions/postgraduate/how-to-apply.aspx

Full-time UK/EU and International PhD Scholarships will include tuition fees and maintenance (£14,777 in 2018/19) for three years, depending on satisfactory progress.

PhD students at the University of Hull follow modules for research and transferable skills development and gain a Masters level Certificate, or Diploma, in Research Training, in addition to their research degree.

Interviews will be held between 7th and 27th February 2019

Successful applicants will be informed of the award as soon as possible and by 15th March 2019 at the latest.