Podcast – Integrating Dementia Research into Teaching

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Welcome to the Dementia Researcher Podcast, brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, a network for early career researchers.

In many of our podcasts, we discuss the life and times of PhD students and research associates. Today, we’re going to look at earlier career research and discuss Master’s programs as a tool for health and social care professionals who want to gain a specific qualification in working with people with dementia, and the Master’s as a path into academia. I would like to welcome our panel today, who are both from the University of Bradford and who are going to shamelessly plug their new Master’s in Advanced Dementia Studies, but also explain more generally what these programs are about, who they’re for, what people would get out of them.

I’d like to welcome Dr. Catherine Quinn, a lecturer in Dementia Studies at the University of Bradford, and Dr. Ana Barbosa, Dementia Care Consultant and Trainer also at the University of Bradford. Welcome to you both. So maybe we can start with a quick round table. You could introduce yourselves and your backgrounds. Catherine?

Catherine Quinn:

Yeah, so I’m Catherine. As Megan said, I’m my lecturer at the Centre of Applied Dementia Studies at the University of Bradford, but before it was a lecturer, I was working as a senior research fellow. So I’ve actually been working in the dementia field for about nearly 15 years now. I’ve worked on lots of different dementia studies, focusing on primarily improving the quality of life of people with dementia and those who provide care for them.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

And Ana?

Dr Ana Barbosa:

Hello, my name is Ana. My background is in gerontology and I joined the University of Bradford in 2015 as a Dementia Care Consultant and Trainer, but I’m more involved in teaching for the Master’s in Dementia Studies nowadays. My research interests are mainly focused on staff wellbeing, particularly the workforce that works in care homes and how to improve the job satisfaction and reduce the levels of stress of staff that work with people living with dementia in care homes.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay, so just before we started recording this, we were talking about how you’re both lecturers, but you both come from quite different backgrounds and you had different routes into becoming lecturers. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that before we go into the Master’s, because it’s quite interesting. We were saying about how maybe people aren’t aware that you can actually lecture in dementia.

Catherine Quinn:

For early career researchers, it’s worth bearing in mind. Actually, there are a number of places now offering Master’s in dementia, and there are a number of different lectureships associated with this. So I guess one of the reasons I wanted to do this podcast is because I came into teaching quite late into my career. I didn’t go straight from doing PhD into lectureship, and I think it’s important for listeners to hear there are other routes into it, because actually before I was a lectureship, as I mentioned, I was 15 years nearly working as a senior research fellow.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

And that was at the University of Bradford, was it, and that was all grant funded?

Catherine Quinn:

That was at the University of Exeter, and before, Bangor University, and that was all grant funded. Yeah.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

And Ana, how did you come into it?

Dr Ana Barbosa:

It was not part of my plans to work in dementia, so I didn’t finish my degree and I thought to myself, “I want to work in dementia.” But during my first degree, I spent a lot of my time working in care homes and I realised then that care homes face a lot of challenges of working with increasing number of people with dementia, and they lack the resources and preparedness to care for these people. So this was the first time or the first incline that I experienced. I thought to myself, well, this would be interesting to work with. Since the degree, I think I took advantage of the opportunities that came up, so I was involved in a Master’s degree where I had the opportunity to work with people in dementia and carers.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

And you were doing the Master’s, or you were teaching on it?

Dr Ana Barbosa:

I was doing the Master’s. I was a Master’s student. I had the opportunity to work with people with dementia and their carers, and after the Master’s, I also was involved in research as a research associate in different projects, also involved people with dementia. This improved my interest and fascination with the topic and inspired me to take up the challenge of a PhD. And then when you are in a PhD, you finish the PhD and you have two choices. You either quit because you realise that academia is not for you, or you pursue an academic pathway. During the PhD, fortunately I had a number of opportunities to teach for past postgraduate courses, and I really enjoyed it. Not only it has improved my confidence, but I think there’s something very cool about being able to change student attitudes and values, support, and guide students, share your knowledge, share your skills with students.

My first job after the PhD was as a trainer, Dementia Care Consultant and Trainer at the University of Bradford. I think trainer goes hand in hand with teaching, and these experience with training provide me with a lot of good examples and people’s experience that I can now share in the Master’s that I’m teaching.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

So you both are lecturers. Are you’re both teaching on the Master’s course, as well as undergrad course, and then do you also have PhD students?

Catherine Quinn:

We both just teach on the Master’s level course. We also have PhD students as well. At Bradford, we have a doctoral training centre that was funded by the Alzheimer’s Society. So, yeah.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay. So maybe, as I said in the intro, you’re going to shamelessly plug the MSC at Bradford. Obviously, we should say there are a lot of Master’s out there that specialise in dementia, but maybe if we can get into the specifics about the one at Bradford, and then we could talk generally about how a Master’s can help with your path into academia. So what does the course at Bradford specifically involve. Ana?

Dr Ana Barbosa:

Yeah, I can start. The Master’s in Advanced Dementia Studies at University of Bradford is for people that have contact with people living with dementia, and is a three year part time distance learning course that offers flexibility to study and work at the same time. So it’s designed to be as flexible as possible, and both international and national students can come together to share their ideas and their experiences of working with dementia. I guess most of our students enrol in this master’s because they want to improve the care and lives of those affected by dementia, but also to increase the confidence and the knowledge and the leadership skills to influence practice.

The idea of this Master’s is to create leaders in dementia care, so we mainly adopt a human rights approach to dementia care, which is about empowering people to claim their rights. And it’s also about ensuring that people’s rights are respected and integrated in the care that is delivered. We have a number of different modules, we are focused on research and also we have option models as to how to improve communication with people living with dementia, [inaudible 00:07:58] activities. So how to develop, implement, and evaluate interventions in care settings or with people living with dementia, and post-diagnostic support. In the end, in the Master’s, students are asked to plan and implement and also evaluate a practice change initiative.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

I had a question. You said that it’s distance learning and you have international and national students. As an international student, could you be based in another country and complete the Master’s?

Catherine Quinn:

Yeah, so it’s all… It’s great, it’s all online teaching. It’s new to me, because obviously I’ve always done face to face teaching, but all the teaching is done online.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Do you do Skype or do you ever have face to face? Virtual face to face.

Catherine Quinn:

We have tutorials, so we have that sort of contact there, but also within the course, there are exercises where students will work on something and post their discussions on a discussion board, and then they interact with each other, so they comment on each other’s posts. It’s really about collaborative learning.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

And have you found that works quite well? Are people really engaged with the forums?

Catherine Quinn:

Yeah, the current cohort have a Facebook group outside. So they do actually, and it’s nice actually, because you see them commenting on each other’s work, and of course that’s great, because people learn through commenting on others.

Dr Ana Barbosa:

I think there’s a tendency to assume that distance learning degrees can be very isolated, because it’s you and a computer and you log onto a computer, but this course is very, very interactive. People can enjoy a tutorial, speak to our colleagues, there’s materials to download, so it’s not only log on in a computer. It requires self-motivation and independent study, but it’s not a light touch course. You can work in a coffee shop or before going to bed, so you have that flexibility, but you can work anywhere, from anywhere in the world. I think that’s one of the advantages of this course.

Catherine Quinn:

I think we’re seeing this in university courses in general. More and more, there’s a move towards perhaps online learning. I mean, the benefit for us and for the people taking part is that these are people who will have contact with people with dementia, so that there’ll be working, so there’s a flexibility to do this around their job or their family life or their caring duties. I think it’s fantastic to have that opportunity out there for people who a traditional course of face to face learning and attending lectures wouldn’t be suitable for them.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

You said you’re, in the end, creating dementia care leaders. So is it vocational or academic? Do you do placements, or at the end, do you write a research project? Are they very similar? Have I said the same thing?

Catherine Quinn:

It’s very much just vocational, so the people taking part are working with some form of access to people with dementia to begin with. Maybe they’re working in care homes, so actually their final year project is really doing something within the service that they’re working in. Which is great, because that has real world impact because they’re able to do some… I’ve got a student looking at robotic pets, for instance, within a car home environment, that that means that they can have real world impact in terms of where they’re working at the moment and doing that.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Yeah, so although we’ve sort of talked about the Master’s being a route into academia, it’s also a standalone thing that can just strengthen your own, like you said, your confidence, your leadership skills within the job that you already have working with people with dementia.

Catherine Quinn:

Yeah, and I think that’s important because I think people, there are different routes into things. As I said at the start, there’s different routes into teaching, for instance.

Dr Ana Barbosa:

Yeah, and completing your Master’s has several benefits. It may open up career opportunities in academia. So for instance, it may prove interest to pursue a PhD. Not only in academia, I think in a competitive market, the masters can set people apart from other applicants.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

I actually wondered about that, because you don’t necessarily have to have done a Master’s to do a PhD in this country, do you? So, would you say that the majority of people who sign up to do the master’s are using it for their job already or as a steppingstone to do a PhD?

Catherine Quinn:

Mostly for their job. I mean, I would say that it is quite hard to do a PhD without doing a Master’s beforehand, because I don’t think degrees give you enough training. For most of the people we’re working with, it’s around helping them with their job. They get an opportunity to pay close attention to what’s happening around them. I’ve been doing some work with some students and it’s about, they’ve done a piece of work around observing communication with people with dementia, so they’ve sat back and watched people interacting with people with dementia or people with dementia interacting with others.

There’s some really fascinating insights from that, and it’s just about them observing what’s happening in the environment that they work in, and it generates understanding for them, as a better understanding of dementia as well.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

We often hear about research led teaching. How do you integrate your own research into the Master’s program?

Catherine Quinn:

I think there’s different ways, because one is actually research experience. A great example is ethics. I mean, obviously in your work as a researcher, you’ve encountered many ethics and ethics boards. I’ve been with my students talking about my experience of seeking consent from a person with dementia, going through the Mental Capacity Act. I showed the students a consent form, a proper NHS consent form, and they were quite thrown by the lengthiness of it, but it’s-

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

This is quite such a common thing on all these podcasts.

Catherine Quinn:

But it’s quite interesting, because I was explaining to them if I went into where you worked and I wanted to work with people, this is the procedure. So there’s a lot of our experience that comes into it. As I say, I mentioned before I was doing this thing about getting people to observe communication. I worked, I did three years on a project with people with advanced dementia with little or no verbal communication, and that experience of doing the observation of work and talking to them about, part of it is me talking to them about my experiences in relation to what they’re studying. But at the moment, I’m actually developing a brand new module on post-diagnostic support pathways for people with dementia, and part of that is actually really about making sure I bring in the up to date research.

We’ve had the new NICE guidelines, I’ve had experienced myself of running a group for people with the early stages of dementia, but we have wider people in our team. It’s not just Ana and myself. At Bradford, we have expertise, people who work with people who have early onset dementia, for instance. People who are from different ethnic minority groups. There’s a lot of expertise that can be brought into what we’re developing, and bringing research into it is ensuring that people have access to the most up to date information.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Because I know, Ana, you said your research is staff wellbeing. That’s looking at the other side of it in a way.

Dr Ana Barbosa:

Yeah, yeah. Just to say that we strongly believe that good research equals good teaching, and I think we see research and teaching, they are both in a symbiotic relationship, so they are not separated. They complement each other. And so research, we use research to improve teaching credibility. I think that’s one of the main purposes, but we also use research in different ways, to inform content of our teaching modules. We use the research to filter what’s out there and share the most robust information about topics. For instance, my own research topic is staff wellbeing in care homes. I tend to bring my own experience and the challenges I faced while I was completing my PhD on this topic, the challenge I faced when recruiting people for a study or when evaluating interventions in care homes. I used to bring my own experience to the modules I teach.

But I also use the research to inform effective teaching and identify what works in terms of learning and teaching activities, and we are also very keen to engage experienced research staff in teaching. As you said, is not only me and Catherine in the team. We also have a lot of experienced member of staff that their experienced is very valuable and we obviously include them in our teaching as well.

Catherine Quinn:

And I think one thing that I was just going to say is I think when you’re doing early care research or you’re doing a PhD, you kind of forget some of the skills that you’re learning on the way. You’re thinking about the knowledge based skills that you’re getting, but you’re also developing a huge amount of transferable skills as well. And as we’ve just talked about, we bring our experience, the joys of doing ethics and things like that, but we bring it into our teaching or doing systematic reviews, which is what we’re doing at the moment. Don’t forget that you are learning these transferable skills on the way.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

And to loop back around to what we were talking about at the beginning, you’re both lecturers, but you obviously have research interests. How does it work in your job? Are you a lecturer who does research on the side, or are you a researcher who teaches? How do you feel your time is split?

Catherine Quinn:

I think it’s combined. I’m heavily involved in what’s called the IDEAL study, which is our big cohort study looking at living well with dementia. That study has been running since 2014, and I was actually employed as a senior research fellow on that. I am still actively involved in that study, still working on papers from that. So I have to say that having switched, it is a bit of a challenge to balance your time. I think anybody new to a lectureship position regardless will always say that. It is a challenge to balance your time, but I enjoy teaching as well. There’s a sort of enjoyable activity.

Also, I think you’re not going to get good research ideas by just sitting, staring at a computer. For me, research ideas come from talking to people and even engaging with the students that I’m with at the moment. I’m learning things that’s quite fascinating, and that starts to trigger in my brain ideas about research.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

I was going to say, actually, there was that big ad campaign for secondary school teachers and they showed kids just asking these questions that you wouldn’t ask yourself. You’d forget how to ask those questions, because you’re so focused on something. So to have someone ask a more simple question, you might go, “Oh yeah.”

Catherine Quinn:

See, but it just sort of triggers, and I think it’s, as I say for me, that’s why we would love doing both, because then that’s why I do research as well, because I like interacting with people and going out and working with people with dementia and carers. You learn a lot from doing it.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

So we’re coming to the end of the podcast now. Is there anything else you’d like to add specifically about the Master’s at the University of Bradford?

Catherine Quinn:

Yeah, so I just wanted to mention the Experts by Experience. The Experts by Experience are a group of people with dementia and carers or ex-carers who, so I guess they’re our patient public involvement group, and they’re very much involved in the teaching that we do. I think that’s incredibly important, because for the past five years on the IDEAL study that I work on, I’ve been working with a PPI group there called the ALWAYS Group. They’ve been so vital to the research study and the research that we’ve been doing, and it’s equally as important we don’t just involve people in research, but we also involve them in our teaching as well.

Dr Ana Barbosa:

We involve people living with dementia and their carers in everything we do. Training, research and the teaching, and we think it’s beneficial to everyone for people and the carers, for students and for us as academics. So mainly, we involve people at different stages of our work, from design, to make sure that the content reflects people’s needs and their experiences, to make sure that the language we use in our work is appropriate. In the delivery, for instance, a module’s delivery, we value their contribution. Because our Master’s is distance learning, we tend to use videos so we ask people living with dementia and their carers to be involved in videos that then we use as a teaching tool that students found very beneficial.

We also ask people living with the dementia and their carers to help us to assess students’ assignments. A few months ago, we had a group of people with dementia and their carers going through students’ assignments, particularly focusing on the language used by students.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

And this is language about people who have dementia [crosstalk 00:21:07]?

Dr Ana Barbosa:

It’s the use of person-centred language, so it’s about how people talk about people living with dementia in general and dementia in general.

Catherine Quinn:

I imagine if people looked at articles that people publish, it’d be quite interesting as well, because sometimes the language used there is not appropriate, is it?

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Well, it’s a bit detached, isn’t it often, scientific language? You sort of forget that there’s a person behind what you’re saying.

Dr Ana Barbosa:

So yeah, people want and enjoy being involved in the work that we conduct at the centre, and all the feedback so far has been very positive, and this also keep us motivated to create more opportunities to involve people.

Catherine Quinn:

Because I always, I say to students, particularly in teaching undergraduates, is really to understand dementia, you really need to meet somebody who has it to understand the condition. We can’t bring that into our teaching the same way, but bringing in people’s experiences, either through videos or their diaries or other information really can illustrate what it’s like to live with dementia.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

PPI is very important in research grants at the moment, so it must inform your teaching.

Catherine Quinn:

I think it’s incredibly important now and I’m seeing it increasingly being used so, but I think it’s great because you’re bringing in people’s experiences into teaching. Therefore, it helps people to learn better and to understand what dementia actually is.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Yeah. So finally, is there any advice you would give to people thinking of pursuing further education?

Catherine Quinn:

My advice is don’t jump straight into it, because I think you’ve got to think about what’s best for you. I very commonly come across undergraduate students and it’s this kind of career progression of undergraduate, straight into Master’s, straight into PhD. I think you need a bit of time to think about what is it you want to do. There are a whole array of different types of Master’s courses out there. We’re talking about one specifically in dementia. There are specific one’s in psychology, there’s a huge array of them out there and you have to think about what is it that you’ll get out of doing the course, what’s best for you, how is this going to help your career progression?

Ours is obviously specifically designed for people who were working with people with dementia, who want to advance their skills. Other types of Master’s focus on different things, but really think about it. I highly encourage people not to do this route of undergraduate, Master’s and straight into PhD. Have a break, because you learn a lot of life skills along the way, and that’s important, particularly if you’re doing a PhD or something like that, to bring those sort of skills into things.

Dr Ana Barbosa:

Yeah, I agree. My advice would be first be ready for a challenge and be fully aware of the level of commitment that is required to complete a Master’s. It requires a lot of self-motivation and independent study, and people tend to assume that a master’s is a natural extension of the first degree, but it’s lightly to be more difficult and students have to work harder, because the level of basic competency is higher. Students in a Master’s are challenged to be more rigorous and to read more and work more than in a first degree. The second advice would be, be passionate about studying and about improving care.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Well, that’s really interesting. Thank you so much for coming in. We’ll put a link to how you can find out more about the Bradford Master’s program and any other Master’s programs. Do you know when the next application date is for the next intake?

Dr Ana Barbosa:

Yes. The deadline to apply for the Master’s in Dementia Studies is this is the 9th of August.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay.

Dr Ana Barbosa:

And the Master will start in September.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay, we’ve got time then. Thank you so much, everyone. If you’d like to add anything to this topic, please do post your comments in the forum or on our website, or drop us a line on Twitter using #ECRDementia. Thank you.

Voice Over:

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