Dr Tara Lamont, Senior Scientific Advisor to the NIHR Coordinating Centre, has become the first School of Healthcare Enterprise and Innovation employee to complete a PhD by Published Work.
We caught up with Tara to talk about this milestone achievement, her experience of completing a PhD by Published Work and what advice she would offer someone who is contemplating going down this route.
What was your PhD about?
My thesis was about why it's so difficult for healthcare managers to use organisational research, which is something that has been bothering me for a long time. It has driven a lot of the work that I've done with the NIHR over the last 15 years, including supporting the HSDR research programme, which serves NHS organisations and leaders.
Unfortunately, we know that not many managers pick up a journal or use formal research, including the outputs of these programmes. I also worked in a role where I was packaging up NIHR evidence in a dissemination centre to try and reach frontline healthcare staff and managers. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what it takes to get research used and useful and my PhD is broadly about that.
What did the process of completing a PhD by Published Work look like in practice?
I actually started a PhD in the more traditional mode way back in the 1990s. It was on a slightly different subject, and I was trying to combine it with full time research. But then I had a family and moved jobs, so I had to abandon the PhD, but that ambition had never gone away.
The great thing about a PhD by Published Work is that you can use the academic publications you have completed during your career and bring them together in a coherent way and demonstrate that is has contributed something original to the field.
I've spent the last year piecing all of this together and creating a linking commentary or synopsis with the help of my academic mentor. It's obviously not the same amount of work as doing a 3–4-year piece of original research, it's more making sense of these scattered publications and constructing a robust linking argument.
A crucial part of the PhD involved completing an updated scoping review to illustrate my knowledge of the field, show where these publications fit within what we already know in the theoretical and empirical literature, and critically examine the work itself. You need to be able to review the strengths and weaknesses of what you’ve done and clearly articulate that reflection.
What was the biggest challenge you faced, and how did you overcome it?
In all honesty, I thought the biggest challenge was going to be finding the time to do it because I’m working full time in a demanding role. But it wasn't difficult at all. I found myself itching to get on with it and spend weekends doing it. Undertaking the PhD late in my career was absolutely the right time for me and it felt like a real privilege, as I was able to make sense of my working life and reflect on the experiments and advances over many years in getting evidence used by managers.
So, I think the hardest thing was that not many people in the faculty or university have completed this kind of PhD, so it wasn't easy to find examples of this kind of written thesis. You can feel a little bit isolated, but luckily for me I had fantastic support from my academic mentor, Simon Fraser, a professor in the Faculty of Population and Public Health, and two experts in the field who acted as informal advisors throughout. We had really stimulating (and challenging) conversations throughout the study period.
What advice would you give to colleagues considering a PhD by Publication?
I think it’s a good idea to check in with someone you trust who has some knowledge of the field, to talk through whether you have a strong enough body of work to go down this route. That usually means having several first-author, peer-reviewed publications in the form of journal articles, chapters or published books.
The guidance can be quite vague, so it’s about sounding things out with colleagues and thinking carefully about your linking thread and distinct contribution to a field. You may need to be selective in curating your published output and targeting those that offer an interesting and new angle on a particular body of knowledge.
Doing that preparatory thinking helps you feel confident when you start, because in many ways you must hit the ground running. A year can sound like a long time, but you’re condensing a huge amount of argument, reading, analysis and thinking into just 12,000 words. A lot of that thinking really needs to be done beforehand, so having those conversations early on is key.
Also, you must make use of the fantastic university services such as the library and Information Services. They really helped me along the way, from support in review searches to formatting the thesis to meet accessibility requirements.
What does it meant to you to be the first person in the school to complete a PhD by Published Work?
I think it’s really meaningful because the school is all about applied research, innovation and enterprise, particularly in healthcare services. It’s very much about practical, useful learning, and that’s exactly what my PhD was about. In that sense, it feels like a good fit for the school, because it helps illustrate what the school is all about.
On a personal level it’s a great honour. Making some of this work visible is wonderful and I feel really lucky to have been supported to do the PhD, and grateful for all the help I’ve had along the way from the school and wider university.
Finally, what’s next for you now that it’s complete?
I’ve been asked to do talks with knowledge mobilisation managers at the local Applied Research Collaboration and an early career researcher forum on some of the practical insights from my work. I’ve also submitted an abstract to a management conference because I think it's vital to get into the management space. I don’t just want to be speaking to other researchers at academic conferences, I want to be engaging with managers in the real world to make my work used and useful.
It’s also pretty nice to have my weekends back, I have to say!
Congratulations to Tara for completing her PhD by Published Work.