By Frances Mair, Programme Director
A new Multimorbidity PhD programme for health professionals, funded by Wellcome Trust, has recently been launched in Scotland. The new PhD programme is led by the University of Glasgow in collaboration with the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh and St Andrews, and aims to train a new generation of healthcare professionals with transferable skills for academic, clinical and policy roles, with a focus on generation of evidence that will enhance understanding of the determinants of multimorbidity and inform development of patient-focused interventions to improve care and outcomes. The PhD Fellows will be recruited from a range of clinical and health professional backgrounds and be offered exceptional opportunities for clinical research across a range of specialisms, from data science and epidemiology, to applied clinical research in a unique collaborative training environment. Our vision is to create a cohort of academic health professionals, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, clinical psychologists and allied health professionals, for whom interdisciplinary and integrated thinking is the norm, with the skills to bridge research gaps and overcome the challenges posed by multimorbidity. Hosted in the Scottish societal context, where multimorbidity is a key health concern, but examining globally relevant problems, it will promote development of a critical mass of multimorbidity researchers empowered to find ways to prevent multimorbidity, discover pathways tractable to novel intervention and optimise management. The programme builds on the strengths of the partner institutions, to create a rich, multidisciplinary environment that will equip a new generation of researchers with a broad range of methodological skills that will enable them to promote new thinking on this complex topic. The programme has three research themes: Prevention and Management; Physical and Mental Health Multimorbidity and Polypharmacy with Inequalities as a cross-cutting theme.
Fellows will participate in a range of cohort-building activities aimed at developing a community and broadening understanding of research and interdisciplinary collaboration. Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) and Knowledge Exchange (KE) skill development are core elements of the planned development programme for Fellows. The Programme will be recruiting for new Fellows annually for the next 5 years, during this time we expect to support 34 Fellows, making this the largest Multimorbidity PhD Programme for Health Professionals globally. We have just recruited our first cohort of Fellows who will commence in November 2022. Further details of the programme and the types of research projects being offered can be found here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvls/graduateschool/multimorbidity/.