PhD opportunity at King’s Collegee Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience

Subject areas: Psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience.

Funding type: Research Training & Support Grant. Tuition fee. Conference.

Awarding body: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP).

There are longstanding concerns that racially minoritised people in the UK are more likely to be compulsorily admitted to mental health units and are over-represented in crisis/ acute mental healthcare pathways. There are also concerns that social care pathways are not accessed equitably, and access to social care may play a role in preventing later adverse mental healthcare experiences.

Research in this area is usually through health records however our understanding has been hampered by a lack of information on people’s social and economic experiences, which are frequently missing or captured poorly in healthcare records. In addition, it is clear that people may take multiple and diverse pathways into mental healthcare, an understanding of these care pathways, in particular the interacting role of social care with mental healthcare, has been limited.

Understanding interactions between mental health and social care providers could help to illuminate ‘protective’ factors which may prevent crisis inpatient mental health unit admissions.

To address these gaps in knowledge, this project will utilise two ethically approved linked datasets, covering a large catchment area of 1.3 million people in southeast London. The first dataset brings together more than 220,387 mental health records, linked to census from England at person-level. The second linkage brings together social care data from Lambeth at person-level linked to mental health service provision data.

Both linkages are the first of their kind in the UK, helping to bridge gaps in knowledge, relating to mental healthcare service provision, and providing service providers unique insights into health inequities in service provision. For this PHD studentship, being able to work with these data will provide unique training opportunities in analyses with large-scale linked data, and in advanced quantitative methods.

More details and apply at www.kcl.ac.uk/study-legacy/funding/bridging-data-for-equity