Health and care across the life course: a relational approach
We undertake research that contributes both to greater theoretical understanding and enhanced service delivery and evaluation. To this end, our research is concerned with understanding health contexts, exploring experiences of health, illness and disability, and providing an evidence base to enable the effective delivery of health and social care across the life course. Our goal is to explore the nature and significance of relationships in understanding health, wellbeing, illness and disability from a range of differing perspectives. Such relationships include those within families, between families, communities and service systems and within and between provider organisations. We bring together researchers, practitioners, service users and carers whose concerns range from birth, through childhood, to adulthood and older age. Partnership working is fundamental to our approach and much of our research is interdisciplinary in nature. The following examples illustrate our attention to a relational approach to understanding health, well-being and care across the life course:
Children, Young People and Families
We have a broad portfolio of interdisciplinary work that is concerned with understanding the health and wellbeing of children and young people and that is committed to furthering theoretical understandings of inter-generational relationships and exploring their implications for health and social care policy and practice . Recent work has focused upon family eating practices, childhood obesity and inter-generational relationships and obesity, in addition, we have a well developed programme of research that focuses upon children’s interactions with and experience of the built environment, with a particular focus upon children’s hospital design. Current research focuses upon understanding children’s care within hospital settings and on children’s interactions with the external environment, particularly green spaces.
Adulthood, gender and sexual health and well being
We have a developed programme of research that examines gender, ageing, and sexual health and well-being. Our focus is on understanding behaviours in order to promote health and better inform clinical practice. Recent work has explored health professional and client communication about their sexual health and well-being needs, the barriers and facilitators to seeking such help, and the ways that individuals at mid and late adulthood experience sexual problems. This multidisciplinary research programme involves collaborations both within and external to the University.
Adulthood and Older People: Palliative and end-of-life care
We have acknowledged expertise in the sociological and policy aspects of palliative and end-of-life care. This includes specialist expertise in the the evaluation of palliative and end of life care services using realist evaluation methodologies, which were developed in Sheffield to enable us to work with patients, carers, bereaved carers, health professionals and volunteers. Our research focus reaches beyond cancer into previously under-researched areas including older people, heart failure, dementia and other life-limiting conditions. Our recent work has been concerned with transitions to palliative care for older people in acute settings.
Older People and Family Carers
Since its inception in 1995 the School has been at the forefront of theoretical and practice developments relating to work with older people and their family carers living with a range of long-term conditions, especially stroke and dementia. Working with colleagues across the UK, Europe, North America and Australasia members of the School have generated a wide range of carer assessment approaches and also developed the concept of an ‘enriched’ environment of care for older people, family carers and staff as captured by the ‘Senses Framework’. Such work has been widely adopted and applied across the spectrum of health and social care seetings for older people and their carers and future work seeks new applications of these approaches in a range of contexts.
The Application of Research: Knowledge translation
We have a long history of joint research appointments between the University and health care organisations. Through working in partnership with practitioners and managers we have developed a programme of research that has focused on the implementation and evaluation of innovative strategies to promote evidence-based practice. Our expertise in knowledge translation has led to lead responsibility for implementation within the NIHR CLAHRC for South Yorkshire and an active role in influencing the uptake of research findings into practice through the Yorkshire and Humber Academic Health Science Network.
We have an established track record of research that has focused on innovative approaches to nursing organisation and service delivery. We have expertise in evaluating the impact of new nursing roles providing care at different points of the life course. Our recent work has focused on assessing the impact of nurse consultant roles and resulted in an innovative toolkit to assist nurse consultants to demonstrate their impact.
For detailed information about current and recently completed research projects and/or for information about posgtgraduate research opportunities in the School, please follow the links below.