Could you briefly introduce yourself, your background before starting your PhD, and your research topic at King’s?
I am an intensive care physiotherapist with an interest in recovery after intensive care and the experiences of people who have prolonged intensive care unit (ICU) stays.
What attracted you most to King’s for your doctoral studies?
King's has a wealth of expertise in both my clinical area and methodologies I am using. It has a vibrant doctoral cohort at the NMPC, with excellent support for learning and career planning.
How did King’s support you throughout your PhD journey, especially when conducting research abroad or remotely?
King's has excellent doctoral training covering a wealth of methodologies and skills, offered flexibly, which is useful as a part-time student alongside parenting. In particular, lots of the training is offered online and at your convenience, which means you can do it when suits you.
Can you share how your PhD research is making a real-world impact?
Most ICU patients have short stays of less than five days. Increasingly, some patients will have prolonged stays; which are more likely to result in long-term physical, psychological and cognitive problems. Before my PhD, there were no quality improvement tools developed specifically for this patient group, who are often awake and able to be involved in decisions about their care, and have different needs from patients with short stays. This risks suboptimal care delivery. We have created a quality improvement tool for prolonged stay patients in the ICU, developed with former patients, family members and the interprofessional team in the ICU. This tool outlines relevant actionable processes of care to ensure that the care received by prolonged stay ICU patients is relevant and patient-centred. We hope this will improve their experience, and possibly their outcomes.
What are your current roles or next steps after completing your PhD? How is your career progressing?
We have determined that our quality improvement tool is feasible and acceptable to ICU staff. We intend to pursue further work to find out what impact the tool has on patient and family satisfaction and clinical outcomes, and disseminate the tool nationally and internationally. I am hoping to continue at KCL as a post-doctoral researcher, and obtain funding to work as a clinical academic.
Have you published your research in any high-impact (Q1) journals?
Yes, I’ve published several articles in journals, including studies on the implementation of a quality improvement tool called “Recover25” to guide care for patients experiencing prolonged critical illness. My work also covers post-intensive care rehabilitation, the co-design of a quality improvement tool for adults with prolonged critical illness using a modified Delphi consensus study, clinician perspectives on actionable care processes for prolonged stay ICU patients and their families, and a scoping review of quality improvement tools aimed at standardising care for prolonged ICU stays.
Can you tell us about your experience applying for NIHR funding during your PhD?
I applied for the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funding in 2017, so it is quite a while ago now. I used the Research Design Service (as was!) at the time, who were so useful providing feedback on my application and doing practice interviews, which were invaluable. I'd highly recommend engaging with them early and as frequently as they allow! I think the obvious challenge is that it's a really big and detailed application, and was the first I'd ever done to anywhere near that level. It took months to prepare, and I was incredibly lucky to have a lot of support from my supervisors - my tip would be if you don't get much support to write the application, you're unlikely to get much of their support during your PhD! Also think it's worth saying that the NIHR application includes much of what a lot of people do in the first year of their PhD - defining the question, working out what training you need, some preliminary literature searches etc - all of that is done during the application. So if you are successful, you start much further along the process than many people starting their PhD - there is an upside to all that work!
I think my work as a research assistant gave me some credibility during the application and interview - just some first hand experience of consenting patients and family, ethics and protocol-writing, data analysis, and a few papers that I had my name on. That real world experience made me more confident at interview too, and made me much more aware of what I was stepping in to during the PhD.