Figure 1 above
How it all began?
I remember attending my first Hospital at Home Society conference in 2024. At this point, I was in the early days of the PhD, eager to learn more about current developments in this research area. During the networking breaks, I remember introducing myself to keynote speakers and little did I know that this would be the start of a wonderful collaboration and supervision for the NIHR SPARC Award.
I was keen to discuss the priority research areas for Hospital at Home (H@H) and later that year, I came across the NIHR SPARC Short Placement Award for Research Collaboration | NIHR. I felt that this was a wonderful opportunity to work with a research team that had the expertise in H@H, who operationally had the research knowledge, the technical and practical expertise in this field, and the existing networks that I could learn from and engage with moving forward. Additionally, my aspirations for professional development to become a clinical academic drove my passion to work with a group of dedicated and trailblazing clinical academics. I felt this would strengthen my experience, especially when considering post-doctoral opportunities.
What is the SPARC award for?
The NIHR SPARC Award allows NIHR academy members to spend time with researchers across other NIHR infrastructure to enhance their personal and professional development and research training experience. From speaking to previous candidates, I learned that this is usually either to develop skills in particular research methods, or to develop collaborations and expertise from researchers in a particular field.
What I did?
The application itself allows you to be quite flexible in how you undertake the placement, which is helpful depending on what you want to achieve. Personally, I had set out 1 day a week over 9 months, whereas other previous applicants undertook it in block placements (e.g. in a 4-week block).
During the placement I managed to conduct clinical visits to H@H services to get the first-hand practical experience. I attended clinical meetings and research meetings linking in with other health tech research centres in the NIHR infrastructure. As part of the award, I also accounted for attending courses and conferences around implementation science and knowledge mobilisation which I felt would be useful for my professional development and demonstrating meaningful impacts with research. The bulk of the collaborative work centred around working on a multi-phase research project. This involved a literature review and arranging an online stakeholder workshop with clinical experts nationally to discuss the findings. This also involved working with a visual minutes artist and presenting the findings at the UK Hospital at Home Society Conference 2026, at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, which supported input into the survey with H@H practitioners.
Outputs of the placement?
This placement allowed us to develop a Taxonomy of Medicines Safety in Hospital at Home which is aimed for upcoming publication. This enables a better understanding of the concepts of medicines safety in H@H and the links between them. Although the aim of the placement is professional development, I was fortunate to have an abstract accepted for oral presentation at the UK Hospital at Home Society conference in 2026, which is planned for submission to the Journal of Advanced Home Medicine. Additionally, a visual minutes graphic produced from this work is displayed below (See Figure 1).
Blog produced by Faiza Yahya (PhD Candidate), with acknowledgements to the support and supervisory team at the University of Warwick (Professor Daniel Lasserson, Dr Ciara Harris, Sophie McGlen) and the NIHR for funding this award. Appreciation also goes to the Academic Career Development Leads (Newcastle University and NIHR ARC West Midlands) for making this happen.