Research Associate

About the role

We are seeking to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join the Same Day Urgent Care (SURGE) Workforce Research Partnership — an ambitious, multi-institution collaboration funded by the NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR) Programme for five years.

SURGE is led by senior researchers at UWE Bristol and brings together co-applicants from 13 partner organisations, spanning universities, NHS institutions, and health system stakeholders. The partnership builds on a strong track record of impactful workforce research, including work on:

• integration and implementation of emerging roles in primary care
• General Practitioners working in Emergency Departments
• general practice composition and performance
• first response services in rural and remote communities

Across the partnership we use a range of approaches including realist evaluation, systematic review methods, scheduling and forecasting, surveys, mixed methods research, and applied quantitative analytics.

This role provides an exciting opportunity for an experienced and motivated researcher to contribute to cutting-edge applied health services research focused on the Same Day Urgent Care workforce. The post-holder will be part of a cross-partnership post-doctoral community, with the opportunity to participate in a skills development programme. 

Core responsibilities will include:

• designing and implementing a project database (e.g., relational database) to store key workforce and service data
• developing reproducible workflows and code for extracting, transforming and loading (ETL) data into structured formats
• designing and conducting statistical analyses to address research questions developed with project partners
• supporting interpretation of outputs and translating results into actionable insights for partners, including NHS stakeholders
• contributing to reports, academic publications, presentations, and partnership dissemination outputs

The role offers the opportunity to work across a diverse partnership and contribute to research with genuine potential to influence urgent and emergency care workforce policy and service delivery.

We are particularly keen to recruit a researcher with expertise in quantitative research methods, to support delivery of the SURGE work programme through advanced statistical analysis, data analytics and data science.

About you

You will be a self-motivated postdoctoral researcher with experience in quantitative health services research methods and a strong interest in applying analytics to real-world NHS workforce challenges. The ideal candidate will have experience working with complex datasets and be comfortable developing structured, reproducible data pipelines and analytical code.

This is a key role within the study team. The postholder will contribute to project delivery through:

• Liaising and coordinating with partner organizations.
• Contributing to protocol development and study documentation.
• Supporting data acquisition, management, and governance processes, including ethics and data approvals.
• Performing data analysis and interpretation.
• Writing reports and dissemination materials for both academic and non-academic audiences.

The post holder will work with a high degree of autonomy, while being supported by the Line Manager, Chief Investigators, the Partnership Manager and the Study Management Group. Excellent organisational and communication skills are essential, as is the ability to work collaboratively across institutions and disciplines.

About the Department

The Research Associate will be based in the Information, Decisions and Operations (IDO) Division, School of Management, University of Bath, and will join the Centre for Healthcare Innovation and Improvement (CHI²).

CHI² undertakes multidisciplinary research focused on health and care systems, and how to improve them in practice. Our research supports policy makers, managers and clinicians to identify feasible and evidence-based changes that can improve performance, quality and outcomes.

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