£11.44 per hour + £1.38 holiday pay
Advertising End Date
25 Oct 2024

Role & Department Overview

Please note: these internships are only available to current undergraduate students in Lancaster University Medical School.

This internship is offered as part of an exciting pilot of research opportunities for Medical School undergraduate students (MBChB and SaES). Each internship will be supervised by an academic member of staff. These opportunities are designed to give students experience of contributing to university research. These internships would be ideal for students considering postgraduate study, intercalated degrees or specialised foundation programmes.

Pay Rate:                  £11.44 per hour + £1.38 holiday pay

Closing Date:         Friday 25th October

Interview Date:       Thursday 31st October or Monday 4th November

Start Date:              2nd Dec 2024

End Date:               18th April 2025

Hours: Up to 5 hours per week

Duration: 20 weeks

Location: Work from home, the campus library, or use the hot desk space in Health Innovation One. Meetings with supervisor will be remote via Microsoft Teams.

Job Description

Red-green CVD encompasses deuteranomaly, protanomaly, deuteranopia and protanopia. These X-linked recessive traits are reported to affect between 2-8% of males and 0.5% of females. Whilst many studies have investigated colour vision deficiency in populations, these still represent minute snapshots of populations within a given country, region or across the globe.

Whilst the true prevalence of CVD within the population is likely under-reported, its impact in certain jobs can have serious implications for safety. Numerous professions have CVD screening requirements, such as airline and marine pilots, air traffic controllers and aspects of the armed forces.

The implications and impacts of CVD on the healthcare profession are under-researched. The nature of the field sees colouration of bodily fluids, interpretation of imagery and other samples by colouration, as well as labelling of cables, tubes and stickers with colour to enable professionals to rapidly distinguish between identically shaped objects that are used for different purposes. Blood collection vials are a prime example of where CVD has the potential for impact on patient care. Detection of some patient symptoms may also be impacted/missed where discolouration of the skin in cyanosis, jaundice, pallor or erythema is present. Similarly, blood test strips and urine dipsticks, presence of blood or bile in bodily fluids may present challenges for healthcare professionals with CVD.

With >280,000 registered doctors on the GMC register and an almost equal spilt of male:female (1), that would mean that approximately 11,000 male and 700 female doctors working in the UK have some form of CVD, but how this impacts patient care, or how many of these professionals cope to reduce the risk to patient care and safety is unknown. This is similar in the Health and Care Professions Council register with 26% of >320,000 registrants across the 15 professions they regulate being male, this represents another with a potential >6,400 males involved in patient care who likely have CVD (2,3). 

Our group has registered a scoping protocol to review the impact and implications of CVD in the healthcare sector. We are examining what already exists in the published literature, to collate and review this data to articulate a clear position on what the currently recognised impacts are. This will involve utilising a variety of search databases to screen published and grey literature.


Major duties:

  • The student will form part of the team who will undertake and support screening for data, data extraction and writing short synopses for relevant material that will form part of at least one published manuscript.
  • The student will develop understanding of the scoping review methodology. This will include scientific writing skills, both reducing complex scientific articles into short concise summaries, as well as helping to write some of the findings into a manuscript, or part of a manuscript – depending on rate of progress across the course of their involvement.

Person Specification

The successful candidate should be able to demonstrate:

  • You must be a current student registered on BSc Sports and Exercise Science, MBChB Surgery, Medicine and Surgery with a Gateway Year and in Years 2-5 of study.
  • Strong interest in undertaking research. Previous research experience is not essential as support will be provided, but a willingness to learn is essential.
  • Basic Word and Excel proficiency.
  • The ability to perform a basic search in search engines such as “PubMed”, “Google Scholar” and other health related databases.
  • The ability to read and understand scientific articles and summarise them in a concise and simple manner.
  • Although not a pre-requisite any prior knowledge of CVD, or an interest in patient safety or ophthalmology would be beneficial.

Please apply through ERS with:

  1. A CV including your education history and any work experience (maximum of two full pages) and,
  2. A cover letter that explains your interest in research, why you would like to be involved in this particular research internship, and how you meet the criteria outlined in the person specification.

For any informal information about this role please contact Professor Adam Taylor [email protected]

 

Working in this role will help develop the following skills and experience:

  • Collaboration
  • Creativity
  • Curiosity
  • Decisiveness
  • Planning and Organising
  • Problem Solving

You are required to submit a cover letter to support your application. Applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

Please note:Unless specified otherwise in the advert wording, this role is only open to individuals living in the UK.

Under the terms of this work, we endeavour to provide the advertised number of hours however,hours are not guaranteed and that work may cease if there is a fall in demand. 

Adverts that display a closing date should be treated as a guide. We reserve the right to close the vacancy once we have received sufficient applications, so we advise you to submit your application as early as possible to prevent disappointment.

 

Help and advice on making applications can be found on the Lancaster University Careers pages. Visit www.lancaster.ac.uk/careers.