The PhD will be registered at UNSW, based in a palliative care / oncology clinical setting. Its aim is to develop and trial an advance care planning mobile application (app) for cancer patients. We are seeking an applicant ideally from one of the health disciplines (including health economics, biostatistics, epidemiology) , with a strong enough clinical background to allow them to understand, explore and evaluate the translational issues involved in implementing an advance care planning app in a real-world setting. Non-clinical candidates with strong quantitative stated preference/biostatics skills will also be considered. Quantitative skills in study design and knowledge of advance care planning is more important than programming skills.

http://www.tcrn.unsw.edu.au/tcrn-apa-research-projects

"Developing a mobile application to support and document advance care planning"

The proposal is to develop the content for a mobile application (app) using tablet technology, incorporating current best practice in relation to advance care planning for patients with cancer.  The goal is to provide a patient-centred technology to support and document advance care planning conversations between patients and their clinicians, across different settings of care.  The PhD would focus on identification of those elements of current best practice which can be transferred to a mobile technology, the initial development and testing of the app within the cancer population, useability and acceptability of the technology within that population, tracking uptake, early impacts on the experience of clinicians working with this population, and clarification of the ethical and IT issues associated with the use of such an app across various settings of care.  Content developed for the app would also be used to structure the teaching of communication strategies to clinicians in this area as part of the trial.  This will reinforce and support the use of the app in routine clinical care, and contribute to our understanding of the potential for such technology to enable knowledge translation into the field, as well as directly to patients.

School:  St George Hospital Clinical School, UNSW Medicine

Supervisors:  A/Professor Winston Liauw & Dr Christine Sanderson

Candidates who wish to apply discrete choice experiments to the issue are encouraged to apply. Sydney is globally renowned in discrete choice experiments and their use in medical decision making. If successful they would have Dr Terry Flynn (UTS) as a co-supervisor; they could draw on globally renowned methodological and IT research at CenSoC (UTS) and ITLS (University of Sydney), together with several end-of-life projects being run at UTS by Dr Flynn and Professor Patricia Davidson.

Contact: [log in to unmask]

For information about essential criteria, here is the link

http://tcrn.unsw.edu.au/tcrn-australian-postgraduate-award-plus-scholarship-top

The deadline is June 30th.  

Dr Christine Sanderson
Staff Specialist
Calvary Health Care Sydney