How did you come into pharmacy?
I trained at Manchester University and chose pharmacy because I was really interested in medicine, but not so much the anatomy side of things. And as a profession, pharmacy has evolved with more of us training to be prescribers and becoming more hands on in our clinical practice.
What are your areas of interest?
Recently I’ve become very interested in preventative medicine and how communities access services and access healthcare resources, particularly in areas where there’s more social deprivation. I think in the next few years, my focus is going to be on looking at how care could be more easily accessible and widely available to the public.
While my main area of interest is renal medicine you have to look at things more broadly as a lot of the patients have more than one condition – like diabetes or cardiovascular disease – and it’s interlinked.
Why did you decide to do the MRes?
I’ve been involved in various projects in my hospital, including one that led to a publication. Through one in particular, I learned lots from people who had more research experience. That got me interested in data research, or kidney research, in general. At the moment I help people on a day-to-day basis, but it might be through contributing to research I can have the most impact, helping at the population level.
By doing an MRes I can move towards that by improving my skills in quantitative analysis and research.
How did you discover the HDR UK programme?
Through LinkedIn. I was researching master’s programmes and came across the scholarships – HDR UK was a newish organisation to me, but what they were offering really fit with what I wanted to do.
How are you finding the experience?
The programme so far has been very exciting and enriching. I’ve learned a lot and been able to network with lots of like-minded researchers in Bristol and beyond. I’ve taken part in networking events and conferences where I was able to speak to people with lots of experiences I could learn from. It’s opened my eyes to the opportunities that might be available for my future career.
Tell us about your master’s project
I’m using a data source called CPRD, which is Clinical Practice Research Data Link, to look at chronic kidney disease diagnosis, and also the prescribing of drugs to treat chronic kidney disease (CKD) in the community. It’s just like a cross-sectional retrospective analysis to capture how primary care is doing in terms of identifying people with CKD and how good they are with providing treatments that could delay people’s risk of going to end stage kidney disease or renal failure.
That ties in with my interest in how we could better use the limited resources that we have in the NHS to maximise the benefits.
What are your plans for the future?
I’m writing potential ideas for PhD research proposals, and looking at various programmes that would fit my interests – with the ultimate aim of being an independent researcher.
Would there be an advantage to being a researcher who has worked as a pharmacist?
My hope is to become a clinical academic, and I really want to focus on pharmacoepidemiology. I think it’s an area which I could contribute to because of my professional background and the perspective that gives me.
Would you recommend the HDR UK MSc Scholarship programme to others?
I definitely would, in fact I have recommended it to several colleagues already, and a junior doctor I worked with turned out to have already applied. It was important to me to discover that there were these exciting opportunities around aimed at making the most of data science.
