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Collaborative Doctoral Awards - new funding call
The HRB will make up to €1.5m available to support each cohort of four or five PhD candidates to be trained in patient-focused research.
Professor Susan Smith at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland is the Principal Investigator on an existing HRB Collaborative Doctoral Award on Managing Complex Multimorbidity in Primary Care.
Multimorbidity is usually defined as the presence of two or more long-term illnesses in a patient. And people with multimorbidity often have complex care needs.
According to Professor Smith,
'Traditional research tended to look at how to treat one disease in isolation. What we are trying to do in our programme is to build capacity to conduct research in multimorbidity so that we can optimise treatment for combinations of illnesses.
'Our programme has four multi-disciplinary PhD candidates who are developing projects that address different priorities in multimorbidity. The overall aim is to better inform policy and practice in order to improve outcomes for patients who are living with complex multimorbidity.
The research topics are informed by a dedicated PPI panel. This helps to focus the research and keep it grounded on improving clinical outcomes and reducing the treatment burden for patients living with multimorbidity'.
Dr Annalisa Montesanti, Programme Manager for the award scheme at the HRB said,
'This scheme aims to train and develop a group of health researchers who will go on to make tangible impacts of health and patient care. Each award will train both health and care practitioners such as, medics, nurses, midwives, dentists and other allied health professionals, and academic researchers from backgrounds that could include health economics, bioinformatics, biostatistics and epidemiology among others'.
Today's new call will remain open until 17 December 2020. The application procedure for a CDA is a two-stage process.
- Initial pre-applications must be submitted by 17 December 2020 and,
- An international review panel will shortlist approximately eight applicant teams who will be invited to submit full applications in early 2021.
The HRB expects to have funding for three awards with a combined or total value of approximately €4.5m inclusive of overheads.
Detailed guidance notes and an FAQ document are available on the call notice on the HRB website.
Queries can be directed to:
Dr Anne Costello, e acostello@hrb.ie.