***THIS JOB VACANCY HAS NOW CLOSED***
Salary: £34,504 – £36,348 per annum, including London Weighting Allowance
Closing date: 14-Nov-2022
Business unit: IoPPN Department: Academic Psychiatry
Contact details: Gemma Archer/Nora Trompeter, gemma.archer@kcl.ac.uk / nora.trompeter@kcl.ac.uk
Job description
We are looking to appoint a Research Assistant to work across two projects: i) exploring veterans’ physical and mental health needs using the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) and ii) the 24-month follow-up of the NHS CHECK study.
Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD):
Veterans can face complex co-occurring physical and mental health problems, yet surprisingly, little is known about veterans’ health outcomes or use of primary care. This is important to understand for service provision; for example, there are numerous services for veterans’ mental health needs, but relatively few tailored to address veterans’ physical health needs, or those with multimorbidity.
An effective way to increase our understanding about veterans accessing primary care, compared to more traditional research methods, is to use primary care records. The CPRD project seeks to i) establish the feasibility of the CPRD to identify veterans within the UK primary care system; ii) to examine whether the socio-demographic, mental and physical health profiles of veterans accessing primary healthcare differ from the general primary care population; and iii) identify the key clinical, behavioural, and socio-demographic determinants of differences in health outcomes between veterans and the non-veterans.
This combined role would particularly suit a candidate with an interest in multimorbidity, organisational mental health, data linkage/management, online data collection, and/or veterans’health. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to develop their skills in project management, data collection and management, statistical techniques, ethics/data applications, and contribute to writing reports and peer-reviewed publications. They will have a proactive and flexible approach to work with the willingness to undertake occasional travel. The post holder may also be required to present research at and attend internal/external meetings, seminars and conferences.
This post will be offered on an a fixed-term contract for 18 months
This is a full-time post – 100% full time equivalent
Key responsibilities
• Contribute to project planning, CPRD applications and approvals, data collection, cleaning, and data management
• Assist with administration related to CPRD and NHS CHECK
• Conduct statistical analyses and writing of high quality reports (lay and academic) and peer-reviewed publications
• Conduct literature review
• Present research at and attend internal/external meetings, seminars and conferences
• Support with communications and internal/external engagement and dissemination
• To ensure data confidentiality, work within the requirements of the Health Research Authority (HRA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 and other regulatory bodies.
The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post.
Skills, knowledge, and experience
Essential criteria
1. An undergraduate degree in epidemiology, statistics, or other relevant degree with a substantial analytical component
2. Excellent working knowledge of and experience of a range of statistical and epidemiological techniques using Stata, R, or equivalent
3. Ability and willingness to investigate and learn new analytical methods
4. Good organizational skills and the ability to work to project milestones/deadlines
5. Excellent written communication skills (e.g., writing for publication)
6. Excellent verbal communication, and presentation skills
Desirable criteria
1. A Master’s degree in epidemiology, statistics, or other relevant degree with a substantial analytical component
2. Experience of data management and data cleaning/checking/validation/merging
3. Experience of working with large and/or administrative datasets, including longitudinal data
4. Experience working with Qualtrics and/or contributing to survey development
5. Ability to write for lay audiences e.g. blogposts
