Health professionals in Scotland will become leading experts in multimorbidity
Published: 22 October 2021
A new generation of healthcare professionals will be trained to become world-leading experts in multimorbidity – one of the most significant healthcare challenges in both the UK and globally.
A new generation of healthcare professionals will be trained to become world-leading experts in multimorbidity – one of the most significant healthcare challenges in both the UK and globally.
Multimorbidity is defined as the presence of two or more long-term health conditions, and is a global public health problem of increasing prevalence. Multimorbidity causes reduced life expectancy, results in more complex healthcare needs and leads to poorer quality of life and higher mortality.
To date, research focuses on adult multimorbidity, but multimorbidity also exists in children and young people; and is associated with lifelong impacts on individuals, their health and families, as well as social services. Multimorbidity is complex, and is linked to multiple factors, including biology, lifestyle and social circumstances.
However, despite its prevalence and serious outcomes, multimorbidity – its causes and how best to treat it – is still not well understood.
Now, a new Wellcome Trust-funded PhD programme, led by the University of Glasgow in collaboration with the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh and St Andrews, will seek to address some of these real-world issues by training a new generation of healthcare professionals with expertise in multimorbidity.
The Multimorbidity PhD Programme for Health Professionals will run through multidisciplinary collaborations across the partnering institutions and will create a generation of innovative world-leading researchers empowered with expertise in multimorbidity to find ways to prevent the condition, and better treat those who are already suffering with it.
The PhD Fellows will be recruited from a range of clinical and health professional backgrounds and be offered exceptional opportunities for clinical research across a range of specialisms, from data science and epidemiology, to applied clinical research in a unique collaborative training environment.
Professor Frances Mair, Norie Miller Professor of General Practice at the University of Glasgow, who leads the new multimorbidity programme, said: “Our vision is to create a cohort of academic health professionals, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, clinical psychologists and allied health professionals, for whom interdisciplinary and integrated thinking is the norm, with the skills to bridge research gaps and overcome challenges posed by multimorbidity.
“The programme builds on the strengths of the partner institutions, which include world-leaders in multimorbidity, to create a rich, multidisciplinary environment that will equip a new generation of researchers to face the challenges multimorbidity poses to both patients and healthcare.”
Enquiries: ali.howard@glasgow.ac.uk or elizabeth.mcmeekin@glasgow.ac.uk / 0141 330 6557 or 0141 330 4831
First published: 22 October 2021