Igniting my future career with a SPARC

Guest post by Naoimh McMahon, Postgraduate student, University of Central Lancashire

Naoimh recently passed her viva and won Research Student of the Year at the North West Coast Research and Innovation Awards 2019.

Around about now the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) will be letting early career researchers know if their applications to Round 5 of the Short Placement Awards for Research Collaboration (SPARC) scheme have been successful.

These awards provide funding to allow trainees within the NIHR infrastructure to spend time in other parts of the NIHR to network, acquire new skills and expertise, and establish collaborations with experts in their field. To be eligible for this round of the SPARC scheme, applicants have to be undertaking a formal research training programme, such as a PhD, and be funded by an NIHR award. Additionally, applicants needed to be based in part of the NIHR infrastructure that has a specific remit to build research capacity, such as the NIHR Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRCs). In 2017 I applied for Round 4 and while I met both of these criteria, I was also facing the final year of my PhD with a lot of writing still left to do! However, this would be my last chance to apply for the SPARC award and so it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up.

For my PhD, I was based at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, and my research was funded through an NIHR CLAHRC North West Coast doctoral studentship. This work was looking at how people negotiate different discourses within the field of health inequalities and how such discourses work to shape thinking and action. With this interest, and a new-found penchant for the North of England, I knew exactly where I wanted to spend my time during a SPARC placement – it had to be in the North East with Fuse! And so towards the end of October, I emailed Professor Clare Bambra (@ProfBambra) to make my case and see if she might be happy to act as my host and supervisor for a placement. After what I can only assume was a glowing reference from one of my PhD supervisors, Clare was on board and we booked in a call to discuss plans for the SPARC proposal.

The requirements for a SPARC award are that you provide a training programme for the placement and you justify the proposed benefit of the programme for your own research and the potential impact for your future career development. After talking through different ideas and options, and considering the short time frame of the placement, Clare and I settled on a training programme oriented around evidence synthesis on the topic of gambling and health inequalities. At the time, gambling was becoming increasingly topical but there was little written about the effects of interventions on social and health inequalities. This focus for the placement was seen as a good fit as Clare had a strong interest in this topic and it would allow me to apply insights from my PhD research to a new body of literature. A co-authored peer-reviewed publication was to be the main output from the placement and we stressed the opportunities provided by the wider Fuse infrastructure for networking during the placement. In March 2018, I found out that my application had been successful and in April I started my six-week stint at Newcastle University.

True to our word, we did exactly what we promised in the proposal! During our scoping searches of the gambling literature we identified a number of recent systematic reviews which synthesised evidence on different types of interventions for reducing gambling behaviour and gambling related harm, and so we felt it would be of value to collate the findings from across these reviews into a single umbrella review. The resulting paper has now been published in Addictive Behaviours. Reflective of the wider health inequalities literature this review has highlighted the lack of consideration of equity effects of intervention strategies in both primary research and evidence syntheses in the field of gambling. Additionally, it has illustrated that there is likely to exist an ‘inverse evidence law’ in this field where there is the least amount of research and evidence for interventions that are most likely to be effective. A big thank you to Katie Thomson (@katiehthomson) and Eileen Kaner (@EileenKaner) for all of their help and input with this review.

 Along with completing this work during my SPARC placement I had the chance to meet people from the Fuse health inequalities programme; get to know some lovely new office mates; attend Fuse’s 10th birthday event and meet people working in local authorities and third sector organisations; meet Fuse Director Ashley Adamson; and attend a Quarterly Research Meeting on eating and drinking patterns in young adults. Last, but certainly not least, I attended and presented my PhD research at the 4th International Fuse Conference which was held in Vancouver in May of last year (see here for a related post on the conference).

In October 2019, the NIHR will launch Round 6 of the scheme and for anybody who may be thinking of applying, here are some things to keep in mind when preparing an application:

• Be ambitious about where you want to spend your time – if you don’t ask you don’t get!
• Develop a training programme that works for both you and your host supervisor
• Try and co-ordinate dates to fit in training or conferences at your host institution
• Detail specific outputs in your application and allow yourself time to get these finished after the placement has finished.

Taking on this type of placement was going to be demanding at any point during a PhD but from my experience it is definitely worth the time and energy. Thank you especially to Clare and Katie, and to everyone at Fuse that made the placement such a positive and worthwhile experience.

Images:

1. Image by Pexels on Pixabay
2. Jeff Kubina from the milky way galaxy [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]

Aspiring to new lows in North West waistlines

Guest post by Naoimh McMahon, Postgraduate student, NIHR CLAHRC NWC

In theory weight management is a ‘simple’ balance between consuming enough energy to adequately fuel ourselves and moving enough to ensure that extra energy is used up. However, in reality there is a complex web of influences that determine our eating and activity habits. We are becoming increasingly more sedentary and are prone to consuming more energy-dense foods. This combination is making the energy balance harder to achieve. When it comes to weight management interventions, what works for one individual is rarely guaranteed to work for the next and so there are real challenges to understand what the right mix of actions are to enable people to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.

Last summer, when preparing a doctoral fellowship application I met with providers and service users from a range of local health improvement initiatives in the North West of England. I was really intrigued by one initiative in particular called Aspire. Aspire is a weight loss programme delivered by a local charity. The design of the programme was unlike any other weight loss programme I had encountered and there was a real sense of personal investment in the programme from both the providers and participants. The thinking behind Aspire is that for individuals who have a lot of weight to lose, intensive and ongoing support is needed to make a positive and sustainable change. The programme runs for 26 weeks and each group has 12 participants. Aspire includes all the traditional elements that you would expect to find in a weight loss programme such as advice and education on food and healthy eating. It also supports participants, many of whom have a body mass index (BMI) of over 35, to engage in graded physical activity.

I think what I found most intriguing about this programme was the emphasis it placed on the person, trying to build confidence and esteem to really convince people that they could achieve their weight loss goals. For example one of the activities that participants spoke about with most feeling was a step climb in a local park at the beginning of the programme. The Aspire providers discussed how this activity served two purposes: (i) to act as a ‘shock to the system’ by allowing the participants to really reflect on their current fitness levels and (ii) to provide a goal to work towards and make a commitment that it will never be that hard again. The group returned to this step climb at the end of the 26 weeks with smart phones in tow and there is some really fantastic footage that captures the excitement and pride at the progress they had made along with the disbelief at how it had once taken hours to complete.

There is never a ‘one size fits all’ and any programme will work for some but not for others. It certainly seems like now it is less about finding a single ‘effective’ or ‘perfect’ programme and more about trying to understand what it is about programmes that enable different people to make positive and sustainable changes. I think we will all know people personally who have taken control over their weight by stumbling upon park runs and ‘getting the bug’ or by using commercial weight loss programmes such as Weight Watchers or Slimming World - finding a system that really works for them. Like other weight loss programmes, there were Aspire participants who did not achieve their goal weight and there were participants who regained the weight that they had worked so hard to lose. What is important is not to write-off such efforts as ‘ineffective’ but to get a better understanding of how and why these outcomes came about. Aspire is only one example of a novel approach to enable people to lose weight but there are certainly elements that have been particularly effective for some participants.


Find out more about the programme and how participants felt about what worked for them.