Final year MBBS medical student, Shohaib Ali, shares his experience of taking the first ever remote online finals last week.
As I sat in my dressing gown, a cup of tea on my desk, and my laptop fully charged, I took in the scene and started to laugh. This wasn’t supposed to be how six years of medical school ended. Covid-19 had burst into everyone’s lives, respecting no national boundaries, why would it pay homage to the smilingly sacred medical school finals? (more…)
Kelly Gleason, CRUK Lead Nurse, explores the value of patient and public involvement in cancer research and how it can improve the quality and outcomes of research.
Patient and public involvement (PPI) is increasingly recognised as important. Funding bodies are asking for more and more from researchers in regard to patient and public involvement. They want to see evidence of authentic and ongoing relationships between researchers and the public that is informing what is being researched, how it is being researched and how findings are shared with the public. Funders want to see more co-creation between researchers and the public and for this to happen, researchers require help accessing larger patient networks and support in maintaining relationships with patients.
I became involved in patient and public involvement almost a decade ago – it was a relatively novel concept back then. The need for cancer researchers to access patients to involve in their research was increasing. The Imperial Cancer Research UK Centre, where I work as a Lead Nurse, established a group of patients and members of the public for Imperial researchers to have easy access to the patient voice. The group served as a resource to researchers and inputted on everything from grant proposals to lay summaries. They helped us create a research culture at Imperial where patients were integral to what and how we carried out cancer research. (more…)
Around 1.25 million people in the UK are affected by an eating disorder. Eating disorder psychiatrist, Dr Dasha Nicholls, provides an insight into this group of complex disorders and the factors that influence them.
It’s common for people to be dismissive when I tell them I work in the eating disorders field. Unless you have suffered from or know someone who has suffered from an eating disorder, the public perception, and indeed the scientific and clinical one often too, is that eating disorders are not serious. Of course, everyone knows of a few high profile people who have suffered or died from an eating disorder, but they may be seen as rare casualties of a celebrity lifestyle.
What many people don’t know is that most people with an eating disorder are of normal or even higher weight, that boys and men are affected too and that eating disorders don’t discriminate by ethnicity or social class. For most people, eating disorders start in the teenage years or young adulthood, but children as young as seven and adults as old as 90 can suffer too. The incidence in children has increased significantly in the past 15 years, for reasons I will speculate on more below. (more…)
As a part of LGBT+ History Month, Stevie Lam, from the School of Medicine has teamed up with IQ Society to celebrate our LGBT+ community and share their stories!
Republished by permission from Springer Nature: Nature Career Column, Being a caregiver while caring about a PhD, Luke Yates, © 2020
Luke Yates discusses how he coped with his wife’s long illness during his PhD programme.
In summer 2008, a year after I started my PhD programme, my wife Samantha was admitted to hospital with a severe chest infection. Sam had cystic fibrosis, and the infection wreaked havoc on her lungs. After a protracted hospitalization, she could not breathe unaided. Furnished with a canister of oxygen and breathing apparatus (a mainstay from then on), along with a substantial amount of antibiotics and other medications, she left hospital, and we carried on with our lives as best as we could. Sam went back to her job teaching a school class of 9–10-year-olds, and I continued pursuing my PhD in clinical medicine at the University of Oxford, UK. But she experienced another infection, which ended with her doctors wait-listing her for a double lung transplant. In January 2010, Sam gave up work, and we began to hope for a life-saving telephone call.
Caring for a loved one who had cystic fibrosis and was waiting for a transplant, while I was trying to complete my PhD programme, seemed impossible. In the laboratory, I was always on tenterhooks, thinking “Today could be the day we get the call.” This uncertainty and anxiety, together with the pressures of research, made my graduate studies tougher than most. As for planning my experiments and conducting research, I needed limited working hours so that I could provide physiotherapy, drug treatments and help to my wife. And I had to get home at a specific time because I shared caregiving responsibilities with Sam’s mum, who tended to her during the day. On top of all this, I had a daily commute of more than two hours. We couldn’t move closer, because we needed to live near our family. (more…)
Originally published on the Dementia Researcher Blog, Luke Whiley, an analytical chemist by training, reminds researchers to look out for opportunities in the small stuff. He tells the story of how a relatively small grant has taken him far in his career in dementia research – to the other side of the world in fact!
If you’d told me this time last year that I would be setting up my own research lab the other side of the world, there’s absolutely no way I would have believed you. But it’s true! I’m sitting here writing this looking out on to the Indian Ocean, having just had my first Christmas down under in Perth – even trying to keep up a stereotypical Aussie Christmas with a beer and BBQ on the beach on Christmas day! It is an example of just how far a research career in science can take you.
I have always been interested in science, but back in my school days I had no idea just how many twists and turns my career would take and how many opportunities would present themselves. Sometimes these were big, involved decisions – a move out of or into academia, for example, but sometimes these start pretty small. That’s all my DPUK-funded course was at first – a small opportunity I noticed one day. (more…)
Last August, medical student Paulina took part in the Summer Institute for Medical Students at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation Addiction Treatment Center in Minnesota.
The SIMS program has a reputation of being a life-changing and eye-opening experience. Thanks to the generosity of the scholarship itself, along with Imperial’s support that covered the cost of my visa, I was able to take part in the programme with minimal personal expenses. (more…)
Dr John Tregoning (JT) from Imperial’s Department of Infectious Disease spoke to the School of Public Health’s Prof Steven Riley (SR) about the coronavirus outbreak that recently began in Wuhan, China.
SR: I work as part of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis and the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics centre with Prof Neil Ferguson, Dr Natsuko Imai, Dr Ilaria Dorigatti, Dr Anne Cori Prof Christl Donnelly, Prof Azra Ghani and Dr Marc Baguelin.
SR: It is a viral infection that was first discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan in 2019 that has been associated with a number of cases of pneumonia – an infection of the tissue in the lungs. You might see it being called ‘2019-nCoV’, which stand for novel (or new) coronavirus. More information has been provided by the World Health Organisation. (more…)
Justin Bieber’s recent Lyme disease diagnosis has brought the disease into the public eye. Professor Gareth Tudor-Williams explores whether there is a link between tick behaviour and a rise in reported cases.
It’s a fact that every time a high profile individual reveals that they have Lyme disease – the latest being singer Justin Bieber – there is an appreciable spike in internet searches, followed a short while later by an increase in the number of blood samples being sent for testing to the Public Health England national reference laboratory at Porton Down.
So this trend would suggest that the publicity about Lyme disease increases health-seeking behaviour in this country, which in turn leads to more cases being diagnosed.
All of which begs several questions. Is the incidence truly rising or are more people being diagnosed who would not previously have been tested? Are there significant numbers of people living in the UK with undiagnosed and therefore untreated infection? What proportion of untreated infected individuals develop long-term health problems? (more…)
With NHS funding for IVF diminishing, Imperial researchers are looking at weights loss as a way to support men who have obesity-related reproductive dysfunction.
Infertility is the inability to have children after 12 months of regular unprotected intercourse and is fairly common, affecting 1 in 7 couples. Male factor infertility refers to infertility secondary to poor sperm quality, and while it is talked about less than female infertility, it is responsible for 40% of infertile cases. Obesity is a rising global epidemic, so it is no surprise that a quarter of men attending fertility centres are obese.
During the last few decades, tremendous advances have taken place in the treatment of women diagnosed with infertility. However, little progress is made for couples with male factor infertility. Therefore, the only therapy offered to couples is assisted reproduction, such as in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) therapy. IVF is effective but with NHS funding diminishing it can be expensive, as well as having potentially life-threatening complications for the female partner such as ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome. That’s why we need to look at other options for couples affected by infertility. (more…)
