Tag: UWE research

UWE Bristol Success within Horizon Europe

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

Whilst the delay to the UK’s Association to the Horizon Europe continues, UK-based applicants can still apply for funding as a consortium partner. The UK government has confirmed successful Horizon Europe applicants will receive funding from UKRI regardless of the outcome of the UK’s efforts to associate with Horizon Europe. This applies to all Horizon Europe competitions with a final deadline date on or before 31 December 2022, where the delay to UK association to the programme may prevent them from signing grant agreements.

In the interim, nearly 600 UK recipients have been granted Horizon Europe Guarantee funding, worth a total of £343 million in programmes relating to all three pillars of the Horizon Europe R&I programme.

Within the 2021-2022 Work Programme, UWE Bristol have received £2.4M of funding on a range of topics including governance models, robotics, machine learning, mobility, and biotechnology. Below is a summary of some of our Horizon Europe projects.

GREENGAGE (3 year, £4.2M Innovation Action)

UWE Bristol Staff: Zaheer Khan, David Ludlow

GREENGAGE’s vision is to promote innovative governance and help public authorities in shaping their climate mitigation and adaptation policies by engaging with citizens to develop 4 Citizen Observatories (CO) in Bristol, Copenhagen (Denmark), Turano-Gerace (Italy) and North-Brabant (The Netherlands). The COs focus on mobility, air quality, healthy living and support the delivery of carbon neutral neighbourhoods, rural depopulation and infrastructure and investment optimisation. Earth-observation and in-situ data will be combined with data from COs to gain new insights and support policy making and decision making processes. Bristol’s CO (in partnership with Bristol City Council and Knowle West Media Centre) will focus on the development of the city’s first Liveable Neighbourhood scheme in partnership with the local community. Using co-design, the local community will be engaged in the scheme from inception, encouraging participation from historically underrepresented groups.

UWE Bristol’s main roles in this project include stakeholder engagement and requirements analysis, co-designing pro-environmental use cases, developing pathways to adoption of a smart urban governance model and evaluation design.

BioMeld (4 year, £3.9M Research and Innovation Action)

UWE Bristol Staff: Andrew Adamatzky, Michail-Antisthenis Tsompanas, Larry Bull

Bio-hybrid machines (BHMs) combine living cell actuators with artificial materials to achieve greater autonomy, flexibility, and energy efficiency compared to standard robots. However, BHMs are developed in silos of individual research groups, making their development more of an art relying on individual knowledge, intuition, and skills than on standardized decision-making processes. To push the manufacturing of BHMs towards bio-intelligent paradigm and model-based engineering, BioMeld (A Modular Framework for Designing and Producing Biohybrid Machines) proposes to develop a self-monitoring and self-controlling manufacturing pipeline of BHMs.

UWE Bristol’s tasks will involve creations of BHMs morphologies in the soft-body physics engine Voxelyze. As these morphologies evolve, their performances will be evaluated and encoded by a Compositional Pattern Producing Network, implementing mutation, evolution and selection with machine-learning-based optimization. Two deep neural networks (DNN) will be implemented, and their suitability will be evaluated.

SOTERIA (4 year, £3.7M Research and Innovation Action)

UWE Bristol Staff: Colin Booth

The emergence of complex urban mobility environments where interactions between different types of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) and with motorised vehicles poses the need for a clear understanding of user behaviours, as well as appropriate urban safety action plans and assessments, supporting the achievement of the EU’s ‘Vision Zero’ for zero fatalities in road transport by 2050.

SOTERIA (Systematic and orchestrated deployment of safety solutions in complex urban environments for ageing and vulnerable societies) will supply a holistic framework of innovative models, tools and services enabling data driven urban safety intelligence, facilitating safe travelling of VRUs and fostering the safe integration of micro-mobility services in complex environments. At the operational level SOTERIA uncovers unexplored behavioural characteristics of VRUs and engages Living Lab communities in social innovation activities for the co-creation of urban safety solutions and infrastructure designs.

UWE Bristol leads WP1 (Protection principles and solutions design) and is responsible for the living labs setup, the organization of the stakeholders’ co-creation activities, and the VRUs behavioural analysis and mobility needs definition. A method based on the quadruple helix of stakeholders’ engagement will be applied in the living labs, engaging residents in 8 cities across several European countries, addressing different types of VRUs including people with disabilities, the elderly, and children.

For further information about these projects, or guidance on Horizon Europe and our eligibility, please reach out to Kate Trigg, Research and Knowledge Exchange Development Manager.

Inaugural “This is Essential Work” exhibition launched

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

Picture by Aline Brune, one of the profiled artists from the exhibition.

The “This is Essential Work” project is an online open-access intersectional feminist exhibition initiated by academic mothers and creators, Michal Nahman (UWE Bristol) and Susan Newman (Open University) in response to their experiences and interdisciplinary research on the commodification of breastmilk and forms of exploitation of women’s bodies and labour. The project received over 700 submissions and the online exhibition was recently launched

The exhibition saw work submitted from several countries including the UK, Brazil, Germany, the USA, China, Nigeria, India and more.

The exhibition emerged from research funded by a UWE Vice Chancellor’s Award for Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research conducted just before the Covid-19 pandemic, in Bengaluru, India, into mother’s provision of “excess” breastmilk to a private company that was processing it and selling it at a profit.

The volume of work was both moving and invigorating.

The judging team commented:

“For this exhibition, the art conveys how work and bodies get devalued. This feminist exhibition is about showcasing this gendered work: to acknowledge, to grieve, and importantly, to connect with one another.

We are showcasing mother/artists who question the value that society puts on their work, including all kinds of labour. The list of our Essential Work is endless and it holds up the world.”

View the online exhibition.

Malaria Programme Management Policy Article Published in BMC Public Health

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

Professors Peter Case and Jonathan Gosling recently had a co-authored article, ‘Effective management of district-level malaria control and elimination: Implementing quality and participative process improvements’, published in BMC Public Health. The article reviews organisation development and quality improvement work that Peter and Jonathan have been conducting in the malaria space for the past nine years and concludes with some policy recommendations for improved programme management.

Although it is widely recognised that strong programme management is essential to achieving better health outcomes, this priority is not recognised in malaria programmatic practices.

Increased management precision offers the opportunity to improve the effectiveness of malaria interventions, overcoming operational barriers to intervention coverage and accelerating the path to elimination.

Peter and Jonathan propose a combined approach involving quality improvement, quality management, and participative process improvement, which they refer to as Combined Quality and Process Improvement (CQPI), to improve upon malaria programme management. They draw on evidence from other areas of public health, as well as pilot implementation studies in Eswatini, Namibia and Zimbabwe to support the proposal. Summaries of the methodological approaches employed in the pilot studies, overview of activities and an outline of lessons learned from the implementation of CQPI are provided.

Their findings suggest that a malaria management strategy that prioritises quality and participative process improvements at the district-level can strengthen teamwork and communication while enabling the empowerment of subnational staff to solve service delivery challenges. Despite the promise of CQPI, however, policy makers and donors are not aware of its potential. Investments are therefore needed to allow CQPI to come to fruition.

Read the full paper.

Climate communications and social action planning for young people’s improved self- and system-efficacy

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

Written by Sophie Laggan, Research Fellow

Intergenerational learning

We all need to work together to address the climate and ecological crisis and young people are crucial to this process. However, as many young people have a chronic lack of self- and system-efficacy – the belief that they, their community, people in positions of power and the tools available to them can make a difference – they do not engage in decision making[1]. It is therefore our job as adults to overcome these barriers to allow as many people as possible to partake in sustainability decision making. Rather than prescribing solutions, older people need to connect with the younger generation over what they care about and provide a framework for them to find their power, enabling young people to work together to come up with contextually relevant solutions and create channels for these ideas to be implemented. Our project is just one example of many that shows how this can be achieved.

Youth Climate Communications

At the start of this year an idea was sparked that led Dr Laura Fogg-Rogers and I to create Climate Communications training specifically for young people (16-24-year-olds). As science communicators, we are acutely aware that it is not just what you communicate but why, how, where and with whom you communicate that counts. So, we wanted to share what we knew with young people for them to gain the confidence and skills they needed to communicate with diverse audiences in engaging ways that specifically aimed to influence the audience’s decision making. We pulled together colleagues from different specialisms and with connections to young people, and together we delivered a free day-long workshop at UWE, with food and drink vouchers for all participants. 12 young people attended, representing Avon Schools Eco Network, UWE-Bristol, and the Youth Action Partnership of CCC-Catapult.

A key focus of the workshop was for the young people to agree on ways of working together – as this is all too often forgotten about when working on projects/campaigns – and for them to narrow down their area of interest (e.g., fast fashion, food waste, meat consumption) into a tangible action for a person in position of power and influence. From this, they worked in teams to map those in positions of power and influence within their educational setting, role played with such people to learn the art of active listening and influencing, prototyped an object for an interactive stall, and turned their hand to filmmaking to raise awareness about their issue. The segment on object prototyping was delivered by Dr Deborah Adkins, who used her 3D laser-cut wooden home models to showcase how these are being used to raise awareness about retrofitting, while the film-making segment was led by science communicator Joshua Warren. You can read more about the day here.

From communications to social action

In the process of developing the workshop we saw a knowledge exchange funding opportunity from UKRI HEIF to further develop the training. All the team pulled together to write the application and we were thrilled to hear, just a few weeks after the pilot workshop, that we had been successful! This gave us another five months to deliver training to young people in the West of England, under the name of CAH-OOT: Climate Action Hub: empowering youth engagement. Taking on board the feedback from the pilot we ran social media training with interested participants and thread this training along with the sessions from the day into a Youth Climate Comms Toolkit. The toolkit was shaped by additional input from the participants and their networks and with support of Team Entrepreneurship Coach Lauren Davies, who ensured entrepreneurial competencies were embedded throughout. In the two months since it has been uploaded, it has had over 400 views and been handed out physically to over 150 young people.

Bite-size trainings from the workshop were offered during the Great Science Share, UWE’s Family Fun Day and at the Global Goals Centres’ Groundbreakers awards ceremony. In addition, in-depth training, consisting of two two-hour sessions held on consecutive weeks was delivered to a college at Bristol. The aim was for the young people to work together on creating communication campaigns around a priority area for their college to lay the foundations for a youth-led Climate Action Plan. The first session focussed on action planning and effective team relationships, while the time in-between was for teams to prototype their communication methods supported by a Team Entrepreneurship student coach and the toolkit. They also had to think about costs associated with the change they were asking for, as for many their audience would have this in the forefront of their mind, as well as co-benefits to show the wide-ranging impact the change could have on their place of education. The final session, meanwhile, was for the teams to present their ideas and reflect on questions such as “what do we do if at first, we do not succeed?” and “how to we maintain and build momentum on these issues?”. Together, the teams came up with plans to speak with Catering about monitoring and reducing food waste, work with the business team to change the bins and signage to make recycling easier, and develop a poster campaign to promote the reusable cup incentive scheme that the young people were previously unaware existed. The teacher was very keen to support the students and helped facilitate the necessary conversations.

In total, CAH-OOT directly engaged 201 young people and 337 adults and indirectly engaged at least 5,000 young people. Further, it is estimated that the total reach of the project to all ages, thanks to the promotion of our work at various events and through media channels is over 35,000.

Particpants of the pilot

Replicating and refining

Findings from both the pilot and the in-depth training revealed that these sessions improved young people’s hopefulness, trust in decision makers and belief that they could make a difference. This is exactly what we had hoped for and thus, knowing this model works, we applied for more funding, this time from Enterprise Educators UK, to roll out the project to more formal and informal education settings. A matter of weeks after we finished CAH-OOT we heard that once again we were successful, this time scoring 1st place from all applicants!

Thanks to our efforts in promoting CAH-OOT, we already have a handful of organisations wishing to work with us and will begin our conversations with them this September to work out how we can work together for mutual benefit. To ensure the project remains co-designed, we will take on board all the suggestions from the participants and coaches on how to improve the training and will invite participants to contribute to any papers that we produce. All pilot participants have been given a local veg box voucher as a token of our gratitude and their affiliated organisation acknowledged in all publications produced.

A huge thank you to all the UWE staff involved in this project: Sophie Laggan (AQMRC/SCU); Lauren Davies (Team Entrepreneurship); Dr Laura Fogg-Rogers (Engineering/SCU); Dr Deborah Adkins, (ABE); Dr Sara-Jane Williams (DGEM); and Dr Rosamund Portus (DGEM); and Joshua Warren and Louisa Cockbill (Engineering/SCU).

[1] Li, C.J. and Monroe, M.C., 2019. Exploring the essential psychological factors in fostering hope concerning climate change. Environmental Education Research, 25(6), pp.936-954; Ojala, M., 2016. Young people and global climate change: Emotions, coping, and engagement in everyday life. In: Geographies of children and young people handbook. Volume 8 Geographies of global issues, change and threat. / [ed] N. Ansell, N. Klocker, & T. Skelton,, Springer reference , 2016, p. 1-19

Academic Spotlight: Dr. Laura Goodwin

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

Dr Laura Goodwin is a Senior Research Fellow in Emergency Care at UWE Bristol. Her study on the temperature measurement of babies born in the pre-hospital setting has been accepted for publication in Emergency Medical Journal this week; in this interview she discusses her work on this research, her recent Showcase and Future Focus Event and her goals for the impact of her work in medical practice.

How did you come to be involved in your current area of work?

I have a PhD in Midwifery, but I work in the emergency care team; looking into prehospital birth allowed me to bring together these two areas of interest. When I looked at the literature on prehospital birth, something that really stood out to me was hypothermia and babies getting cold after prehospital birth. There wasn’t much information about why this was happening, but there was evidence to suggest that paramedics weren’t consistently recording the temperatures of babies in the prehospital setting. I decided to work with our local ambulance service, SWASFT (South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust), to see whether it was an issue in the South West as well; the North East had done some research and there was some work from abroad, but very little research into why this inconsistency with prehospital care was happening.

I did a two-phase study. Firstly, I looked at whether temperatures were being recorded by our local ambulance service for babies born in the prehospital setting by analysing anonymised data from electronic patient care records. From this we found that less than 3% of babies had their temperature recorded; in the second phase of the study, I held interviews with paramedics to gather data on why this is the case.

What led you to this area of research?

My PhD was around inequalities in pregnancy outcomes. MBRRACE (Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries) publishes a report every few years looking into maternal deaths, and another perinatal report about baby fatalities. The reports for the last decade have suggested that there are massive inequalities in outcomes; for example, black women in the UK are particularly likely to die as a result of pregnancy or childbirth, four times more likely than white women are. Other minority ethnic women and their children face similar inequalities, as do women from socially deprived backgrounds. My PhD specifically looked at the relationships in maternity care and how those could influence outcomes.

Coming into the emergency care team, I do a lot of prehospital work with paramedics to support their practice; because of the range of skills they have to cover, it’s impossible for them to be experts on everything so we are trying to give all the support we can to fill potential gaps in knowledge or gaps in confidence. I came into this area of research because it’s a combination of those two worlds, improving paramedic practice and my maternity background to fill this gap that I recognised, in supporting prehospital births. It’s been overlooked because it’s so small – only about 500 babies per year in the South West – but the outcomes can be so massive and it doesn’t take much to change it. Keeping the baby warm is a small thing we can do to have a huge impact on people.

What do you think can be done to improve the situation?

That’s the next thing I’m working on. I’m putting together a funding application at the moment which will focus on designing an intervention for paramedics. In hospitals, when they transfer babies from the neonatal unit to a ward, they often have a flowchart of things to do to ensure the baby stays warm. We’re going to look at what already exists in hospitals and try to adapt that to the prehospital setting, to give paramedics a clear action plan. There were lots of issues raised in my interviews with paramedics regarding the barriers they experience, so we’ll use some of that data and the existing hospital interventions to work with the stakeholders to find the best way to support paramedics.

What kind of barriers did you find out about from the paramedics you interviewed?

One of the main things was equipment. Most of the ambulances had a tympanic thermometer to use, but those can’t be used on babies under three months. The alternative thermometer, an underarm digital thermometer, was often missing or out of battery due to infrequent use. Another factor was that paramedics already felt that they were already doing everything possible to keep the baby warm, so taking temperature wouldn’t change their temperature management actions. The lack of understanding or awareness of the need to take temperature, to document it and act on it, links to the lack of clear pathway – paramedics didn’t know what to do if a baby was cold, what would happen, or what the lower temperature limit is for babies. Patient care records don’t have a specific box for neonatal temperature on the maternal record, which added to the belief that it didn’t need checking.

You hosted a conference recently to present these findings – how was that experience?

The event was multipurpose, to act as a dissemination event to get the information out there, but also to have people feed in new research ideas. I called it a Showcase and Future Focus Event – the aim was to share knowledge and generate new ideas from people working on the ground, who are dealing with these issues day-to-day. It was a very successful day – we actually had to close registration twice because the event became so oversubscribed! Originally we were planning to have 20-30 people for a small workshop but we ended up having over 70 people register and nearly 50 come along. I presented this work I’ve been talking about today, and then we had further presentations. We had an advanced helicopter paramedic who is part of the neonatal retrieval team come in to talk about the challenges of prehospital birth, and another presentation from a neonatal nurse consultant speaking about what happens when a baby arrives at the hospital if they’re cold. We also had some patients and some members of the public talking about their experiences, and a demonstration from a midwifery lecturer who has designed a new thermometer for the prehospital setting.

Afterwards, we had discussions about where people think the research priorities should be in prehospital birth, and we discussed the inequalities faced in this area. It was a lot of work to organise, but I got great support from my colleagues, Cathy and Alice. The event went very well, and I definitely couldn’t have done it without them.

What’s next for you?

I’m currently working on a local service evaluation which is funded by the South West Academic Health Science Network (AHSN). This work is investigating what impact this inconsistency in temperature measuring is having on babies once they arrive at hospital. Anecdotally, we know that babies often come in cold from the ambulance service, but there’s no real data to clarify this issue. I’m also looking at inequalities: are there certain groups of women who are more likely to have a prehospital birth, and does that interplay with outcome? Are there groups more at risk of a poor outcome following a prehospital birth?

The next phase of that is looking at the advice given by our call handlers when people call 999 about a prehospital birth. Sometimes by the time paramedics arrive the baby is already born, limiting the paramedic’s ability to manage the baby’s temperature effectively – they can already be very cold and therefore come into hospital cold as a result. We want to look at what advice is given when people call about this – are they being told about the importance of temperature and how to manage it? The next step in managing this is working with stakeholders to work out what advice should be given and how it should be delivered. You can read Laura’s new study here (view in the Emergency Medical Journal)– it’s well worth the read! You can connect with her via Twitter.

Introduction to our research strength focus: Creative Industries and Technologies

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

At UWE Bristol we are proud of our active and collaborative research community of bold and innovative thinkers that are breaking research boundaries. 

Our four key research strengths are:   

  • Creative industries and technologies 
  • Digital Futures 
  • Health & Wellbeing 
  • Sustainability and Climate Change Resilience

Over the past three months we have been sharing content around our research strength, Health & Wellbeing. We are now moving onto our next focus: Creative Industries and Technologies

Creativity powers innovation, growth and human progress. Here at UWE Bristol we’re working with industry-leaders and with agile, leading-edge innovators to create new futures in everything from film and TV, animation and digital story-telling, games and virtual reality.

Our research strengths include:

  • creative industries and digital technologies
  • audiences of the future and immersive technologies
  • design, fabrication and print technologies.

To introduce this research strength, we are going to share with you two of our Creative industries and technologies research case studies: 

View all of our Creative Industries and Technologies case studies on our website.

Global boost for alternative film culture

Activists, artists, filmmakers and exhibitors have joined forces as part of the world’s largest alternative film network, building on the work of UWE Bristol academic Dr Steve Presence.

A scholar and activist in alternative film culture, Dr Presence co-founded the Radical Film Network (RFN) in 2013 in a bid to reinvigorate the innovative, politically engaged history of this sector. The network has since spread to 37 countries in four continents, including 207 affiliated organisations and 700 individual members.

Dr Presence, explored the organisational patterns, successes and failures of activist film culture dating back to the 1970s. This was matched by an analysis of the output of production companies, video-activist groups, film festivals, exhibition collectives, television series, commissioning departments and counter-cultural networks.

The most viable networks shared three commonalities – a strong identity, coherent internal organisation and widespread external relationships.

In creating something new, Dr Presence sought to establish a decentralised model, with network members taking charge of activities and decisions, whilst building a diverse stakeholder community to facilitate more opportunities for growth and collaboration.

Read the full case study.

Shifting perceptions of criminal justice

A scholar and activist in alternative film culture, Dr Presence co-founded the Radical Film Network (RFN) in 2013 in a bid to reinvigorate the innovative, politically engaged history of this sector. The network has since spread to 37 countries in four continents, including 207 affiliated organisations and 700 individual members.

Public engagement in the criminal justice system has been enhanced by our work, thanks to an innovative and digitised approach to capturing the history of the UK’s courthouses.

UWE Bristol’s Dr Rose Wallis is a renowned expert in historic criminal justice, exploring how the law influenced social relationships in the past, and their relevance to the present.

Dr Wallis’ work was central to the transformation of Dorchester’s Shire Hall Courthouse Museum – more than 17,000 people visited in its first year of opening in 2018, with the vast majority of those surveyed saying it made them rethink the role of law in their lives.

Dr Wallis helped to shape the narrative approach of the museum and researched much of the archival material that would eventually be used for its exhibition.

Working with museum professionals, creative media producers, and the Dorset History Centre, multi-media guides, interpretative digital displays and learning activities were developed with a core focus on historic stories of lived experience.

Read the full case study.

Academic Spotlight: Dr Harriet Shortt

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

In this Academic Spotlight interview, we asked Dr Harriet Shortt, Associate Professor in Organisation Studies at UWE Bristol Business School, about her area of research.

Tell us about your background and your research interests?

I am interested in the spaces and places of work and how they make people feel, and how the material environment of work impacts the everyday lives of workers. I also use visual methods in my research, and I’m interested in how these approaches can tell us something more or help us understand something better, instead of simply asking people questions. Often visual research methods allow us to uncover emotional responses, rich in meaning. I also use visual methods, such as participant-led photography and projected drawing, in my teaching practice and on our Executive Education course ‘Personal Mastery in Leadership’.

Why do you think workspace is an important area of research?

Spatial change is important for lots of different reasons.It’s important from an organisational perspective because it’s their real estate and space is expensive, so organisations want to know they are using space effectively and economically. And it’s important from an individual perspective – we know that space impacts people’s sense of wellbeing, sense of identity, and sense of belonging. If organisations think about space carefully and really tune in to how it makes workers feel, it can have a direct impact on belonging, well-being, happiness, and ultimately productivity. We’re having big conversations now in society and workplaces about where we’re working and why, and how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted working practices.  Now is the time to be doing research and understanding why people like to work at home or in the office or somewhere in-between. It’s important that we empower workers to create their own spaces and have a voice in this ongoing conversation about workplace.

You’ve led projects with both public and private sector organisations. What is the most exciting or rewarding consultancy project you’ve worked on?

I think my PhD research will always be one of the best research projects I’ve led! I explored how hairdressers construct a sense of identity in relation to the material environment of work and worked with lots of hairdressers working in salons all over the UK. I think hairdressing salons are one of the most fascinating places in the world, full of social, cultural, and aesthetic meaning. In particular, the experience of liminal space emerged as being crucial to this project. For so long, spaces such as corridors, cupboards, toilets, and doorways have been overlooked and seen as transitory ‘non-places’, yet for the hairdressers, or perhaps any sort of worker in a public-facing, open-plan, fluid sort of space, these ‘non-places’ are important in relation to how they construct a sense of identity, how they seek friendship, and how they manage their emotions in the workplace. In this way, these were real sites of identity construction for these workers, and they weren’t ‘non-places’ at all – they are full of meaning.

Have the COVID lockdowns provided any interesting avenues for thinking about home and hybrid working?

Absolutely! This is something we should all be thinking about and talking about, because we’re not necessarily out of it yet and it has impacted such a huge part of the knowledge workforce. I don’t think we’ve had the chance to properly talk about it yet, but we should start to consult workers about how home working or hybrid working has been for them.  I feel lots of organisations have said ‘we don’t need our offices anymore’, or ‘if course we can all work from home now’ – there seems to be some wild decision making going on and really, we should be spending time asking the workforce how they feel about it? Asking questions, like how’s it been? What was it like for you? What did you learn about homeworking? And what do you want to bring back to the office? I don’t yet feel there is a shared understanding of what hybrid working actually is. Everyone’s interpretations are different and that’s ok, but organisationally we need to make better sense of what new working practices look like – it goes back to this idea of identity, belonging and a connection with our workplaces – this needs re-thinking post-Covid.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m working a number of live research projects at the moment and writing up papers as outputs from research projects that I’ve just finished.

Two core projects I am part of are: 1) as part of a cross-faculty funded research project, I’m working on a project focussing on hybrid working with colleagues who work in public health at UWE. We’ve started gathering visual data that explores what hybrid working looks like for knowledge workers during Covid-19. And 2) as part of a British Academy of Management grant, I’m working with colleagues at UWE, Oxford Brookes and London Met who specialise in leadership and language, and I’m supporting the visual methods approach we are taking. We’re using visual methods to understand what inclusive leadership looks like and how this manifests across different cultures.

Fair Bus Fares for Young People Policy Briefing

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

Young people aged 16-24 use buses more than older age groups and have lower access to a car.

Yet they face a postcode lottery in accessing free and discounted bus fares, a new policy briefing from UWE Bristol and Sustrans finds.

Access to buses can affect the experiences and life-defining opportunities that young people are able to reach as they gain independence.

“Buses are the sole form of transport available where I live. I do not drive and I do not intend to… I therefore need the buses to get anywhere”

Katie, 24, Cornwall

However, for many young people, cost is a barrier to using the bus.

The policy briefing brings together new research and existing evidence and identifies changes that are needed to make buses fairer for young people aged 16-24.

Download fair BUS FARES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE POLICY BRIEFING
APPENDIX 2 SUPPORTING MATERIAL FOR MAPS 1-4 (YOUNG PERSON BUS FARE OFFERS)

The Fair Bus Fares for Young People policy briefing is produced as part of the project Transport to Thrive which aims to build the case for transport policy that better meets the needs of young people aged 16-24.

Transport to Thrive is a partnership project between the Centre for Transport and Society at UWE Bristol and Sustrans.

It is part of the Health Foundation’s Young People’s Future Health Inquiry. The Health Foundation is an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK.

Overview

The Fair Bus Fares for Young People policy briefing has three parts:

  • Part 1 Current situation and future ambition: describes why buses and bus fare support is important to young people. It maps the current offers available across the UK, as well as future ambitions outlined in the Bus Service Improvement Plans of 79 local transport authorities in England.
  • Part 2 Case studies: looks at the policy justification, uptake and impacts of existing bus fare schemes for young people in different parts of the UK.
  • Part 3 Time to act: summarises the policy priorities that bus fare support for young people can help address. It ends with a set of policy ‘asks’ developed with young advisors aged 16-25.

Part 1 Current picture and future ambition

The policy briefing mapped the current offers available to young people across the UK:

There are currently many areas of the UK where there is no support for young people beyond the age of 16.

In areas with an offer, there is little consistency in the type of offer that is available and the upper age limit that is eligible. Offers range from free bus travel (London, Greater Manchester, and Scotland) to discounts ranging from 15-50%.

Very few schemes support young people beyond the age of 18. Notable exceptions to this include Scotland where bus travel is free for under 22s and West Yorkshire where 19-25s receive a 33% multi-operator discount (Map 2).

The report also mapped the future ambition for bus fare support for young people according to Bus Service Improvement Plans (BSIP) – these are the plans that the 79 Local Transport Authorities in England (outside London) were asked to produce in November 2021 in order to access government funding for buses.

BSIP ambitions and recent policy developments in Scotland and Wales show increasing recognition of the needs of young people over the age of 16 in relation to bus fares. However, there is still little consistency in age criteria and offer-type.

“The price should be the same for everyone.”

Poppy, 16-24

“Being a young person doesn’t stop when you are 18”

Sara, 20, West Yorkshire

“Multiple offers and prices make fares confusing. Annual passes are only viable with consistent usage. Flat fares are the most obvious and simplest solutions.”

Sunshine, 16, North Wales

Part 2 Case Studies

The policy briefing looked at four existing schemes available to young people beyond the age of 16 (18-21 Zoom Beyond, South Yorkshire; 16+ Zip Pass, London; 16-25 MCard, West Yorkshire; Free travel for Under 22s, Scotland).

With few schemes available to young people over the age of 16, these case studies offered rare and valuable insights:

  • Bus fare support for young people could help to address multiple policy priorities including supporting access to opportunities, reducing inequalities and shifting travel behaviour away from the car.
  • There is a high demand for bus fare support beyond 16 and 18. For example, in London, a study found 98% of 16-18 year olds said free transport was important to them*.
  • Schemes can have wide benefits to young people and can enhance inclusion of young people from all backgrounds, helping to level the playing field by removing cost as a barrier to mobility.

Part 3 Time to act

Recent policy developments across the UK, present an opportunity to make bus fares fairer for young people.

We ask national governments to:

Set out a minimum offer for young people aged up to 25 and to support local transport authorities to move towards this.

We ask any transport authority or operator developing their offer to:

• Offer flat fares to young people up to the age of 25 years
• Align offers across authority boundaries
• Work with young people to develop offers to help ensure available support meets their needs
• Collect and share evaluation data to show how these schemes meet policy objectives

* Partnership for Young London. “Free Transport Means Everything to Me”: Understanding the impact of the suspension of free travel on under-18s. Funded by Trust for London, 2020

Illicit Drug Contamination of the Bristol Pound

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

Recent research conducted by undergraduate forensic students at UWE Bristol has revealed levels of drug contamination on the Bristol Pound (£B) notes. 

A high percentage of circulating bank notes across the world are contaminated with illicit drugs. Contamination on bank notes can be spread through direct contact and contamination from cash points, whilst paper-based bank notes are also believed to present a suitable matrix for the inclusion of drug particles.

Research has revealed that it is possible to detect some geographical or regional variation in the drugs found on different bank notes- for example, cocaine is the most frequently seized stimulant in western and southern European countries, whereas, amphetamine and ecstasy predominates across northern and eastern Europe.

To present, there have been no investigations regarding drug contamination of local currencies. The team at UWE Bristol have delved into this area of research, which presents an interesting angle on drug circulation.

The Bristol Pound at the time of sampling was the largest local currency in the UK, with approximately 7 million circulating from September 2012. Using a total of 28 £B banknotes, drugs were extracted by simple sonication, filtered to remove dirt and paper fibres. The levels of drugs were then determined by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. Cocaine represented the predominate contamination, mostly associated with the £B 20 notes, the highest domination in circulation.

Senior Lecturer Forensic Chemistry Dr. Kevin Honeychurch, who led the research, commented:

“This is an exciting piece of research, undertaken with a number of undergraduate Forensic Science students as co-authors on the paper. It highlights the extremely low levels of drugs that can be determined by sophisticated instrumentation such as liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. I now undertaking further research into the levels of illegal drugs in water and air.”

To find out more please visit our research repository.

Academic Spotlight: Dr Pippa Tollow

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

In this Academic Spotlight we asked Dr Pippa Tollow, Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology at UWE Bristol.

Tell us about your background and how you became interested in your research area?

It was during my undergraduate degree and a sandwich year working in the NHS that I discovered an interest in health psychology and decided this was the area I wanted to work in. This interest was further reinforced through my MSc in Health Psychology and subsequent PhD studies at the University of Surrey, and it was through my PhD that I became particularly interested in the importance of communication in healthcare and the patient-clinician relationship, as well as the value of representing the patient voice in research. When looking across my previous experience in research and clinical settings, appearance-altering conditions were a clear theme and so the opportunity to join the Centre for Appearance Research (CAR) in 2017 felt like the perfect fit. Since joining CAR, I’ve been able to work across many exciting projects, developing expertise in the areas of cancer and burns, and in psychosocial interventions to support individuals with appearance-altering conditions.

Tell us more about your research and research projects, are there any particular projects you want to highlight?

My research primarily investigates the psychosocial impact of appearance-altering conditions, with a specific focus on this topic within cancer and burns. In particular, I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done at the Centre of Appearance Research (CAR) around decision making and breast cancer, where I’ve worked on projects to promote shared decision making around breast reconstruction (the PEGASUS trial, funded by Breast Cancer Now) and exploring the experiences of women seeking a Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy (CPM). Each of these projects has allowed us to further understand the experiences of women when making decisions around their care and to make recommendations about how to improve these experiences in the future, including the development of the PEGASUS intervention (http://www.pegasusdecisionmaking.com/).

Another project that I feel is particularly important is some work that I led exploring the experiences of adults with incurable cancer with regards to their appearance, which was the first study to look at this topic in detail, and revealed the powerful role that appearance changes played in the experiences of these individuals. This was identified as an area where patients felt significant distress and wanted further support in order to improve their wellbeing. We hope to take this work further in the future, with the potential to develop support for patients and healthcare professionals in this underexplored area.

How could your academic expertise be practically applied for a business partner or external collaboration?

Our research at the Centre for Appearance Research (CAR) is highly applied and often involves collaborations with charities, clinicians and other organisations. A real strength of these collaborations is the combination of our research knowledge, our wealth of experience working in the area of appearance-altering conditions, and our expertise developing psychosocial interventions, with the knowledge and expertise of our collaborators who work in these areas. These collaborations allow us to help solve real-world problems, ensure that our research is relevant to the populations we are hoping to help, and increases the impact of our work.
My own specific expertise lies in the psychosocial impact of cancer and burns, including exploring the experiences of individuals in relation to these sensitive topics and how these groups can be further supported with regards to appearance concerns. I’d be keen to hear from any organisations who would like to work together on projects in this area.

You Can connect with Dr Pippa Tollow via her LinkedIn

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