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Provocations Seminar Series 2

Following our successful Early Career Researcher Conference in March, we are inviting you to take part in a free programme of immersive workshops designed to start, or progress, your thinking about your own researcher journey.

In partnership with the University of Liverpool, NHS R&D North West is pleased to announce the launch of the second series of the highly successful Provocations Programme.

Provocations is a programme designed to enable you to participate in active dialogues between academic researchers from the University of Liverpool and health and care practitioners.   The themes we are exploring in series two relate to several current health and care matters including the built environment, creative responses to historical medical racism, menopause and understanding frailty from a clinical and social perspective to name but a few of the themes that we will cover.

Provocations is only the start of the conversation and from each of the sessions there will be an opportunity for you to explore the theme further with the researcher in structured action learning sets designed to help inform development of practice and policy in health and care settings. 

The sessions are designed and delivered in such a way as to ensure that you can utilise the time you spend participating as a contribution to your professional CPD requirements.  They last approximately 2 hours, they will be held online 12-2pm. Attendance Certificates will be issued by NHS R&D NW to show the CPD outcomes and benefits of each session and follow on activity.

Numbers for the sessions are limited and the series will run monthly from May to December 2024 inclusive.  Please book early to avoid disappointment. We will let you know when each session is open for booking.  We look forward to welcoming you at these workshops as you take your next steps on your research career pathway.

Events

Reframing Menopause: Challenging Stereotypes and Shaping Understanding

Elham Amini 

23 Oct 2024
12.15 PM–2 PM

The fifth session in our provocation series two will be led by Dr Elham Amini who is a Lecturer in Sociology at Liverpool University.

This provocation session will encourage thinking about menopause and menopausal experiences as this relates to at least two key aspects of women’s lives, namely, gender and ethnicity through life course perspective and bring some examples from her research on menopausal experiences of Iranian Muslim women. So, instead of focussing on menopausal symptoms, such as hot flushes, anxiety and depression and vaginal dryness and how to fix them by ‘giving hormones’, Elham will aim to explain:

  • What are the negative meanings that attached to menopause?  why menopause serves as a negative shift in women’s social status and their self-appraisals?
  • How and why is it important to understand the menopausal experiences of ethnic minorities in Global North or women from Global South? How knowledge /producing knowledge might exacerbate social inequality and marginalisation and shape “otherness”?
  • How a natural and inevitable part of a woman’s life course has been shaped as a catastrophe by celebrities and some journalists? Do we need to pause menopause?
  • To what extent do you agree that medications such as Estradiol and lubricants can “fix” the menopause? 
  • To what extent do you agree that current conversations and education around menopause are inadequate and shapes menopause as an illness? Do they address the underlying reasons of stigma and shame in experiencing menopause?

Identifying and Mitigating Racialised Microaggressions​​ in Health and Care: Building Equity and Empathy

Lilian Otaye-Ebede

20 Nov 2024
12.15 PM–2 PM

The session will be based on two interlinked studies exploring the lived experiences of minoritised NHS employees living and working with visible (race/ethnicity) differences.

Black and Minority Employees (BME) working in the NHS account for over 20% percent(NHS England, 2023) of the workforce, however our findings showed that they continue toexperience discrimination, harassment, microaggression, inequalities in access and opportunities, unfair and disproportionate treatment, lack of career progression, incivilities and exclusions at work. These experiences have an impact on their wellbeing, job performance and level of patient care. 

So, what can we do as colleagues, managers and leaders to mitigate these experiences, become allys and improve the working lives of our colleagues?

In our provocation session, we will seek to create an understanding of the challenges experienced by BME healthcare workers, the impact of these experiences on the individuals, their teams and the organisation; and our roles as change agents, mitigators and influencers in responding to these challenges. 

Our overarching aim will be to create awareness and enable participants develop ‘Reflective Competencies’ needed to approach and support the necessary change required to better the experiences of BME employees working in the NHS.

Understanding frailty as a clinical, social and existential situation.

Susan Pickard and Chris Williams 

4 Dec 2024
12.15 PM–2 PM

The final session in our provocation series two will be led by Professor Susan Pickard, Professor of Sociology and Head of Department for Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool.

Frailty is increasingly operationalised as a medical condition that interacts with other conditions to put an older person at risk of adverse outcomes. Clinically, it is measured and approached through numerous tools and scores. These developments are generally viewed as positive and helpful in the clinical setting. However, as a label that has long been used in the English language to denote a state of weakness and fragility, it is strongly resisted and feared by older people themselves. At the same time, there is a social dimension to the experience of (both kinds of) frailty: it originates as much in the social as in the biological domain, co-exists with sources of strength, resilience and well-being and is dynamic and changeable for a combination of all these reasons.  Indeed, the connection between social events and health is corroborated in neuroendocrinology and potentially traceable through biomarkers conceptualised through the allostatic load.

The breakout sessions will consider the following questions:

  1. How does it feel as a health care professional to be more aware of the lived experience of frailty and the way it is structured?
  2. How would you use this understanding in your practice?
  3. How useful would you find it for these concepts to be incorporated into a tool kit designed to help practitioners in your interactions with older frail people and what would you like to see in this toolkit?

How Do Cities Exclude Older Women
(and How Do They Fight Back)?

Professor Francesca Piazzoni

22 May 2024,
12 PM–2 PM

The session will explore Francesca’s research:

Scholars have long demonstrated how urban planners and architects traditionally design cities for men, not for women.  Efforts to change exclusionary built environments, however, primarily focus on young women (seeking for example to make cities friendlier for girls at the park or child caring mothers), overlooking age as a factor of spatial discrimination. Her research explored how older women respond to exclusion by navigating and transforming hostile environments.

And answer the following questions:

  • How do our memories affect the ways we use space?
  • How does being a woman impact getting older?
  • What does safety mean to different people, and how can we create places that allow multiple groups to feel welcomed?

Health and the built environment

Dr. Christina Malathouni 

12 June 2024
12.15 PM–2 PM

This provocation focuses on the particular spatial and environmental requirements for staff REST areas linked to healthcare buildings, and how these should not be dealt with as part of the rest of spaces in these buildings, e.g., clinical, office, or other work areas. The importance of good staff rest areas is gradually being highlighted in complementary frameworks and plans that focus on the NHS workforce. For example, the NHS Health and Wellbeing Framework (2021) specifically includes “Environment” as one of its seven elements, and its proposed “Diagnostic Tool” points to the need for “access to break rooms and outside space away from patients, where [NHS people] can relax in an ‘off-duty’ environment”. As is well known, the above were brought to sharp focus during the recent pandemic that highlighted the strain under which healthcare staff are regularly placed in their workplace. Unsurprisingly, the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (June 2023) also refers to “good quality rest areas” under “Retain: We are safe and healthy” (paragraph 27), and actually uses this as an example of “getting the basics right”. 

The following questions will be discussed in the breakout sessions:

  • What is your personal top priority during your rest time at work?
  • In an ideal world, with no practical or financial limitations, how would your staff rest area look and feel?
  • In your current staff rest area(s), think of that one characteristic that you find the least satisfying and how you would replace or re-design it to match your top priority in relation to your rest time at work. 

Cycle of Inequality to Cycle of Equality through Belief and Validation for People with Energy Limiting Conditions

Bethan Evans

11 Sept 2024
12.15 PM–2 PM

The fourth session in our provocation series two will be led by Dr Bethan Evans, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and co-director Centre for Health, Arts, Society and Environment (CHASE), University of Liverpool.

This provocation session is based on research from the `Disbelief and Disregard: Gendered Experiences of Healthcare for People with Energy Limiting Conditions’ project that analysed 962 responses to a survey carried out by Chronic Illness Inclusion.

The research found that 75% of respondents with a range of ELCs felt they were not listened to or believed by health or care professionals. This was worse for patients who also experienced forms of discrimination such as sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and fatphobia. Experiences of disbelief and disregard in health and social care settings had a much wider impact on people’s lives, leading to damaged self-esteem and self-confidence, and knock on effects in relation to work, education, welfare and benefits, creating a cycle of inequality.

In this session we’ll discuss the ways in which this cycle of inequality might be moved to a cycle of equality through simple changes in approaches to people with ELCs, and also discuss the difficulties faced by healthcare professionals in better supporting patients with ELCs, identifying resourcing and systemic changes that might be required.

The following questions will be discussed in the breakout sessions:

1. Consider the potential consequences of energy limiting conditions going undiagnosed or disbelieved and how this can affect a patient’s wellbeing. Sort these potential consequences into the following categories: physical health, mental health, social wellbeing, economic wellbeing.

2. Considering your answers to activity 1, think about how these consequences would be changed by a diagnosis and support from health and social care. Consider how this could change a patient’s wellbeing in the same four categories.

3. Think of possible ways that health and social care professionals can attempt to combat the discrimination that patients with ELCs face. Try to list 3 ways that this can be combated by individual health and social care professionals and 3 ways this can be addressed by changes to health and social care systems.