Research Assistant

About the Role
This project requires a skilled mouth-care champion to raise awareness of the importance of oral health, to implement our sustainable pathway and educate the healthcare workers at RLH’s ICUs. Establishing a mouthcare champion in this project is critical to successfully integrating oral health into the RLH’s ICU services. The post is 0.6 FTE.

About You
A Mouthcare Champion who will be an experienced dental nurse/dental-hygienist/therapist, in an acute care setting playing a vital role in ensuring that every patient receives high-quality and consistent oral care. In Acute Care, oral health can sometimes be overlooked, however this has a major impact on comfort, nutrition, communication, infection control, and overall recovery. A Mouthcare Champion helps bridge this gap by promoting best practices, supporting staff, and advocating for patients’ needs.

The Champion is typically a trained healthcare professional with a strong interest in oral health and patient well-being. The post will provide guidance under the supervision of the PI on assessment techniques, appropriate mouthcare products, and individualised care plans especially for patients who are critically ill, have cognitive impairments, or are unable to perform their own hygiene. By identifying early signs of oral discomfort, dryness, infection, or poor dentition, the Champion helps prevent complications such as aspiration pneumonia, hospital acquired infections and reduced nutritional intake.

About the School/Department/Institute/Project
The critically ill patients represent a vulnerable group. The development of user-friendly and sustainable mouth-care model would aim to reduce the complications such as dry mouth, dental abscess, and VAPs in Critical Care patients.

About Queen Mary
At Queen Mary University of London, we believe that a diversity of ideas helps us achieve the previously unthinkable.

Throughout our history, we’ve fostered social justice and improved lives through academic excellence. And we continue to live and breathe this spirit today, not because it’s simply ‘the right thing to do’ but for what it helps us achieve and the intellectual brilliance it delivers.

We continue to embrace diversity of thought and opinion in everything we do, in the belief that when views collide, disciplines interact, and perspectives intersect, truly original thought takes form.

Benefits
We offer competitive salaries, access to a generous pension scheme, 30 days’ leave per annum (pro-rata for part-time/fixed-term), a season ticket loan scheme and access to a comprehensive range of personal and professional development opportunities. In addition, we offer a range of work life balance and family friendly, inclusive employment policies, flexible working arrangements, and campus facilities.

Queen Mary’s commitment to our diverse and inclusive community is embedded in our appointments processes. Reasonable adjustments will be made at each stage of the recruitment process for any candidate with a disability. We are open to considering applications from candidates wishing to work flexibly.

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