HDRUK Clinical Doctoral Fellowship

Are you a fully qualified, ambitious and experienced registered healthcare professional or pre-CCT doctor or dentist, committed to the progression of clinical research and a career in academia? Would you like the opportunity to undertake a PhD within HDR UK as the national institute of health data science? Do you want to receive research training whilst conducting a clinical research project in one of the UK’s leading research-intensive Universities? 

HDR UK aims to unite the UK’s health data to enable discoveries that improve people’s lives, with a 20-year vision for large-scale data and advanced analytics to benefit every patient interaction, clinical trial, and biomedical discovery, and public health. This PhD is funded by HDR UK's Medicines in Acute and Chronic Care Driver Programme, aiming to tackle the most critical health challenges associated with medicines. The vision of this Driver Programme is to understand and transform the use of medicines for patients of all ages, especially those with complex care needs caused by multiple long-term conditions (MLTCs). Consequently, the programme will have a major focus on health inequalities, particularly the interaction between personal characteristics such as age, ethnicity and socioeconomic position, where MLTCs and polypharmacy are more prevalent. The programme will maximise patient benefit and reduce medicines-associated harm. It will innovate guidelines and their deployment, to enable responsive medicines stratification and personalisation in real-time, informed by mature digital systems and individually linked health data, with the ultimate aim of improving patient outcomes.

The PhD will include use of routine health and care data assets (e.g. Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD), Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) databank, Connected Bradford) to investigate how prescribing of medicines should be optimised for people living with MLTCs. Areas of focus could include:

• Optimising prescribing of anticholinergic medications in secondary care.
• Reducing harmful overprescribing of medicines in primary care.
• Reducing harmful drug-drug interactions across all clinical settings.

We are seeking an exceptional candidates to become a future leader in health data science, providing access to training activities through HDR UK Futures and the Driver Programme local teams. The successful candidate will join a vibrant cohort of HDR UK-funded PhD students in a highly interdisciplinary environment, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and networking across the UK. 

Salary: Commensurate with your current salary
 Fixed term for 3 years (Full time) 

 University employment or alternate employment options with your current employer where appropriate (see details below).

Additional information 

Clinical duties 

There are no defined clinical duties so that you can concentrate fully on your research. Where some clinical work is identified as appropriate, if registering for your PhD on a full-time basis, this will not normally exceed 10% of your time on an annualised basis and will be in agreement with your supervisors and the programme management team. 

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact:

Professor Andy Clegg

Email: a.p.clegg@leeds.ac.uk .