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PhD studentship in requirements for information systems for stroke  
care, University of Leeds

This EPSRC funded PhD studentship is part of the national Large Scale  
Complex IT Systems (LSCITS) initiative (see www.lscits.org).  One part  
of the programme is focusing on the design and implementation of large  
scale systems in health and social care.

Modern large scale systems pose major challenges, not least in  
identifying requirements for them.  The practical importance of the  
challenges cannot be underestimated, as major investments in England -  
particularly in the NHS National Programme for IT - have run into  
problems which can be traced to poor understanding of requirements.   
In the USA, President Obama has recently committed to spending  
billions of dollars on shared electronic patient records, accessible  
by all health professionals 'anywhere, anytime', but at the moment  
there are no plausible requirements to underpin this massive investment.

The elicitation of requirements typically focuses on relatively small  
scale settings, but our interest here is in developing requirements  
for systems that span many settings and do not have a single design  
team.  Rather, large complex systems (e.g. the World Wide Web) show  
that they able to accommodate a mix of conventional software  
engineering approaches and have 'organic' or 'emergent' components.

In investigating health care systems, there are many possible systems  
that could be investigated, but we have chosen to start with stroke  
services because they require a high degree of co-ordination, and that  
co-ordination is currently difficult to achieve in practice.  The  
improvement of stroke care is now a national priority in the NHS in  
England.  People who have a stroke typically require support from the  
NHS, social services and voluntary organizations (e.g. to help with  
shopping when they leave hospital following a stroke).  At present the  
NHS and social services use a mix of electronic and paper-based  
information systems.  Many GP practices are fully computerised, but  
other hospital and community services, and also social services, still  
rely on paper-based systems.  People who have a stroke can have  
hospital records 20cm or 30cm thick, which cannot easily be searched.   
In Leeds, and a number of other parts of England, stroke patients have  
their own paper records.

The successful candidate will have the opportunity to draw on work  
being undertaken in the Clinical Information and Management System for  
Stroke (CIMMS) project.  The proposition for CIMMS is that the quality  
of stroke services would be improved if a routinely collected stroke  
data set was available to service managers and practitioners.  CIMMS  
is part of the National Institute for Health Research CLAHRC  
programme, a £21M. R&D programme involving NHS and social services  
partners across Leeds and Bradford, and the Universities of Leeds and  
York.  Prof Keen is Director of the CLAHRC. (http://www.nihr.ac.uk/infrastructure/Pages/infrastructure_clahrcs.aspx 
)

The PhD studentship will involve working with the supervisors and with  
NHS, social services and other staff to identify requirements for  
stroke services.  We envisage that the requirements set will integrate  
requirements of all services, particularly for sharing information,  
and fully reflect patients' views about the nature of the information  
held about them. The work will investigate how to best elicit, record  
and trace requirements and move towards the design of better tools to  
support these processes.

The successful candidate will have a main base in one of the  
supervisors' departments, but will be able to draw on the computer  
science (http://www.cs.york.ac.uk) and human computer interaction (http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/research/hci.htm 
) resources at the University of York and health services research at  
Leeds.

Value of Award: One studentship - Fees paid at home/EU rate, plus  
£13,290 maintenance for up to three years full-time study.

Closing Date: 24 August 2009

Minimum Academic Requirements: A good first degree or post graduate  
qualification in a relevant discipline. The studentship will be  
awarded to the strongest candidate by merit.

Supervisory Team

Prof Justin Keen, Prof Helen Petrie and Dr Christopher Power

For further details, contact Prof Justin Keen (after 17 August 2009):
[log in to unmask] or 0113 343 6941

or

Prof Helen Petrie
[log in to unmask] or 01904 434336


All enquiries about the application process are to be made to:
Vikki Crouch
Clerical Officer,
Faculty Graduate School
Room 10.110, Level 10
Worsley Building,
University of Leeds,
Leeds LS2 9NL
(Tel: +44 (0) 113 34 38221; Email: [log in to unmask]).

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