Bethan Page
DPhil student in tthe Department of Experimental Psychology
Bethan is working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with Professor Charles Vincent.. Previously Bethan worked with Oxford Patient Safety Collaborative at the Academic Health Science Network (AHSN) on the evaluation of quality improvement projects.
Over recent years there has been a trend towards increasingly complex healthcare tasks being carried out by patients and their relatives in the home. Lay people now carry out nursing tasks such as measuring vital signs and wound care, as well as more complex tasks such as enteral tube feeding and long term ventilation. Many of these tasks were once exclusively the responsibility of healthcare professionals. Bethan’s research is exploring the experiences of parents who provide complex care for children (feeding tubes, tracheostomies etc.), and seeks to identify how best to train and prepare parents for these demanding tasks.
Bethan, with the support of OxSTaR and colleagues from the hospital and community, has received £30,000 funding from the Q programme (funded by the Health Foundation and NHS England and NHS Improvement) to co-produce videos and hands-on simulation training for parents caring for children with feeding tubes and tracheostomies.