Things continue to be very busy here at MINIMEDs research HQ. There is a lot of people helping me, but really for the day to day PhD stuff it’s a team of just one – me!
We continue to talk with families who are in our research study, and also our parent advisory group. In fact, we just had another parent advisory group meeting last week and I will update the website ASAP.
What I will just mention quickly, is that I have had the pleasure of presenting our work at a few meetings recently. And I am pleased to say that we have been awarded a couple of prizes too. I appreciate that this research isn’t really about me, it’s a collective effort. But it is nice to receive awards that people think our research is important and it helps us to build momentum for future projects.
NIHR Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Research Collaborative – PhD Day 2026
The first was for a presentation I gave a our regional NIHR funded Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Research Collaboration PhD networking day. I presented our work on safety and how we developed a story to describe what it is like to learn to give medicines at home.
These photos aren’t the best but it gives you an idea of what was going on.
Great North Pharmacy Research Collaborative Conference
This was a meeting last week in Gateshead where there were over 100 pharmacy staff from across the North and across the different parts of the NHS. No award at this meeting! However I did present two posters:
- Safety incidents experiences by families after hospital discharge
This was a quick and brief overview of the sorts of things parents have been telling me about after they have gone home from hospital. This is just to give people a flavour of what our results will show.
- Learning from our parent advisory group about resilience
This is some of the work that is ‘behind the scenes’ of the main PhD studies we are doing. As reported on the Parent Advisory Group page , at our meetings we have often talked about resilience at what it means to us. We have listened to what has been said and combined this with what the academic world says to improve our understanding of resilience.
Overall it was a really good meeting. I trained in Sunderland and worked for Newcastle hospitals so I knew a lot of people there. It was great experience for me to continue the journey of how we use our research to engage with professionals and what we have learnt to change healthcare for the better.
University of Leeds – School of Healthcare Annual Celebration event
The other award we have received is from the University of Leeds at the School of Healthcare celebration event for Post-Graduate Researcher of the Year for 2026.
‘Post-graduate researcher’ is a term used at the university for people like me who have a degree already in a subject – mine is in pharmacy – but continue to do research as your career continues.
I work amongst many other amazing post-graduate researchers here at the university. So it means a lot to me to be recognised amongst the community that our research is considered to be award-worthy!
Please stay tuned for further updates. We have another publication and also the parent advisory group that I will post updated for asap.
MINIMEDs 
Leave a comment