Nursing PhD | Midwifery PhD

The 大象传媒 offers interdisciplinary study across a range of allied health and healthcare practice areas.

Programmes are focused on practical wisdom with research students playing an important role in exploring, developing and improving clinical practice. There are opportunities to engage with a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives.

We offer PhD study in both full and part-time modes and welcome students with significant professional experience, who are able to use and share the career skills they have developed, as well as those who have recently completed first degrees and wish to take advantage of their academic momentum.

Nursing PhD

Our postgraduate students in nursing work across diverse practice settings and engage new theoretical perspectives with a view to enhancing practice in a number of areas - including community-based, mental health, paediatric and social care-related -  in statutory, NHS and/or third sector services.

Our research embraces a diverse range of qualitative, quantitative and participatory methods and includes use of the arts, participatory and new methodologies with projects often drawing on personal professional or experiential perspectives. You will be contributing throughout your studies to a research portfolio that has major impact on understanding the experiences of health, illness, the meaning of care and people’s involvement in this and the provision and the systems that support it.

Midwifery PhD

Midwifery and maternity care are open to a wide variety of research questions and designs.

Staff and PhD students offer a community of learning which allows pertinent issues in maternity and midwifery to be explored. As such the area fosters research into specific clinical practice and effects of patterns of care, the midwife/family relationship, midwifery practice, and historical perspectives. Research may be qualitative or quantitative approaches, or explore mixed methods.

Graduates with a PhD in nursing or in midwifery from the 大象传媒 proceed to employment in various organisations including NIHR, NHS, university lecturer posts and consultancy, as well as further research.

Key information

As a Nursing PhD or Midwifery PhD student at the 大象传媒, you will benefit from:

  • a supervisory team comprising 2-3 members of academic staff. Depending on your research specialism you may also have an additional supervisor from another school, another research institution, or an external partner from government or industry
  • opportunities to present and discuss your own work with other researchers in seminars organised by research centres, groups and the university schools.
  • desk space and access to a desktop PC
  • access to a range of electronic resources via the university’s Online Library, as well as to the physical book and journal collections housed within the Aldrich Library and other campus libraries. 

Academic environment

PhD students in Nursing and in Midwifery take an active role in a range of intellectual and social activities within the university. All postgraduate students are integrated into Centres of Research and Enterprise Excellence (COREs) or Research and Enterprise Groups (REGs). These provide you with a community of like-minded scholars and practitioners and give opportunities to present ‘work in progress’ and network with other researchers.

We provide PhD students with opportunities to work across and gain context from the spectrum of Health Sciences. We believe that this interdisciplinary focus provides our students with an appreciation of real-world problems, and ensures that they are highly employable.

PhD students are provided with a forum for discussion of research activities, for sharing expertise in methods and research approaches and to offer support to all those undertaking or wishing to undertake research in the broad areas of nursing and midwifery. We support all members associated with the area in their research activities, help colleagues with conference presentation preparation, with research planning and publication activities as well as grant applications.

We have links with clinicians and other academics at the 大象传媒 and also invite doctoral students to attend the discussion areas. The profile of the area includes midwives, nurses, physiotherapists, podiatrists, occupational therapists and sports scientists.

We also collaborate with staff from other parts of the university, for example, Brighton and Sussex Medical School and with departments in other universities together with clinicians and managers locally.

The Brighton Doctoral College offer a training programme for postgraduate researchers, covering research methods and transferable (including employability) skills. Attendance at appropriate modules within this programme is encouraged, as is contribution to the Schools’ various seminar series. Academic and technical staff also provide more subject-specific training.

Expert supervision for a Nursing PhD is offered, for example, in the nature and meaning of care across a number of contexts spanning acute, primary and community as well as secondary care and across a diverse range of health and long term or illness conditions. This includes contributions to new interventions, digital and technological applications, lifeworld-led care perspectives and new understandings of peoples’ experiences.

We have particular strengths in phenomenology and lifeworld research, action research, ethnography and grounded theory and application of new theory relevant to care and well-being. Our research spans the range of age groups; we are undertaking distinctive research in children, critical care, e-technologies and health, inequalities, as well as growing older and living well in older age, gender and old age, and exploring well-being