Research Assistant/ Research Associate

The post-holder will join a Nuffield Foundation funded project entitled ‘Mothers in treatment for substance use: using electronic records to understand individual and treatment characteristics associated with childcare and maternal outcomes. This post will be based in the Health Psychology Section, Department of Psychology, a section active in the area of clinical health psychology and behavioural medicine.

Many families engaging with child welfare are affected by maternal substance use, yet there is little information about the relationship between substance use treatment services and childcare outcomes. This project aims to investigate this by analysing patient records using SLaM Case Registry Interactive Search (CRIS) electronic health registry, Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and family court dataset (Cafcass).

The project comprises of 3 work packages: i) identification of mothers

receiving substance use treatment; ii) examination of how issues related to childcare including involvement with social care services and informal care are reported and addressed in substance use treatment services; and iii) investigation of clinical practices for women before and after retaining/regaining/losing custody of their child.

The post-holder will work on packages ii and iii. Primary responsibility will be to

carry out quantitative and qualitative analysis of electronic record data; working closely with the project PI and prepare reports and publications. The post-holder will also be expected to assist with the supervision of junior researchers, including MSc students.