The Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care is delighted to congratulate two former PhD students - Dr Ed Baker and Dr Sarah McAllister - for each winning a King’s Outstanding Thesis Prize.

The prizes are highly competitive, with only a limited number awarded across the year. This is also the first time in the last five years the prize has been awarded to students in the Faculty, so celebrating two winners for their outstanding doctoral theses this year is extra special.

Dr Ed Baker’s thesis proposes a pathway-based intervention development toolkit for local trauma hospitals to use when constructing a standardised approach to discharge for patients who experience blunt thoracic injuries. It also highlights opportunities to optimise self-care for these patients.

His supervisors were Gerry Lee, Chris Norton and Andreas Xyrichis and Philip Hopkins (external supervisor).

Dr Sarah McAllister’s thesis set out to understand and improve nurse-patient therapeutic engagement on acute mental health wards by co-designing a complex behavioural change intervention. The thesis makes unique and important contributions to the literature on therapeutic engagement, and has developed a new, co-designed model of engagement that has subsequently been used in local and national policy to guide nurses’ practice.

Her supervisors were Professor Glenn Robert, Professor Alan Simpson and Dr Vicki Tsianakas.

The King’s Outstanding Thesis Prizes are nominated by the external examiners who assess research theses and judged by a panel consisting of the Director of Research Talent and the Chair of the Research Degrees Examinations Board.

Both theses are available to view via King’s College London’s Research Portal:

• Read more about Ed’s thesis
• Read more about Sarah’s thesis