I cannot believe it, the end of this week marked the end of my second year of my PhD. I am now officially a third (and hopefully final) year PhD student. The great news is, we are running to plan. As you should be able to see from the Gantt chart above I have until December this year to finish my data collection. Thankfully, everything seems to be running pretty smoothly, as you can see in my updates below.

Pharmacy Student Study Update

Well the great news is that we have completed the first of the two planned studies with our pharmacy students at the University of Bath. I finally hit my target recruitment for study 1. It has taken me a good 9 months to get all the participants we needed, thankfully I completed the qualitative aspect months ago and all the data is ready and waiting to be analysed. So this week I am going to be looking at that as I have a week off from the Community Pharmacist study (more about that in the update below). In October when the students return, we will start the second study and hope that our recruitment is quicker this time round – with all that we have learnt from this first study about how to engage students in our research.

The students who have taken part in our first study have been fantastic and they have given me lots of ideas, and plans for future research. So a huge thank you to all of them for all their help. Finishing this first study was a real boost for my motivation – the end is now in sight and it is just the icing on the top of the cake that I met so many students on my way to this first target.

Community Pharmacist Study Update

Things are starting to move pretty quickly now which is exciting. We have around 20 pharmacists from a range of community pharmacy settings (supermarket, national chain, independent, as well as some lovely locum pharmacists) signed up and booked in to take part so we are already roughly 1/5 of our way to our minimum recruitment figures (min 104 participants – max 130 participants). The rest are slowly but surely coming in and we are starting to experience a snow-ball effect where the participants we have already met are recommending our project to their colleagues. I will take this opportunity to say thank you so much to those pharmacists who are recommending our study – we really appreciate your support. Unlike the pharmacy student participants, our community pharmacist participants need a little more notice to either organise locum cover, or find a day when they can come in, and so I have just begun to meet my first few participants in the last few weeks. So far so good, the testing is going well and our first few participants have reported that they enjoyed the study and see the applications of the theory underlying these studies and our plans for the future as important for their profession which is more than encouraging.

It has now been about six weeks since I sent out the first round of invitations to pharmacists to invite them to take part (before that we spent a few weeks contacting pharmacy organisations asking for their permission to carry out the research with their pharmacists). The standard protocol is to do three mail shots, so after this we have one more mail-shot to do (in about another 6 weeks time). I will also be following this mail-shot up with phone-calls to pharmacies over the coming weeks, to aid recruitment. Anyway, Jane and I spent almost 2 whole days preparing information packs for our second round of invitations to pharmacists to take part in the study. I am so grateful to Jane, like all lecturers she is stupidly busy, but she still finds time to help me out stuffing envelopes.

Key dates:

One of the big upcoming events in this project’s diary is our Project Management Group meeting which is next Monday 25th June, which I am both nervous and excited for. It’s like having a mini viva (viva: the oral exam which all PhD students have to pass to receive their PhD) every time we meet with our PMG. All the members are incredibly knowledgeable and very important in the Pharmacy world and so it is important to me that I can show them what a great job that Jane, Marjorie and I have been doing since we last met. In July we will submit our interim report to our funders so the meeting is in preparation for this.

One other little project…

As if I didn’t have enough to do this week, this is the week that our bathroom is being renovated. This is the first major thing we have done to our home and I am very nervous that there is something we haven’t considered or planned for. Purposefully, I have not planned to meet any participants this week, as I know that tomorrow when our bathroom is ripped out I am going to be a bag of nerves and won’t settle until it is all re-fitted and finished! A nervous researcher is not ideal especially when running experiments because the experimenter can consciously or unconsciously have a large effect on participants behaviour. I always aim to be calm, collected and approachable. If any of my family or friends are reading this last line I know they are now laughing because I am not well-known for being calm and collected, I am generally quite an excited, over-enthusiastic person!

I promise to be back with another update soon!