Doctor Natasha Campling

Dr Natasha Campling started her career as a cancer and palliative nurse at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London before becoming an academic researcher in 2000.  She has worked on an extensive range of studies, leading to a broad range of publications.  During the last decade she has focused entirely on palliative and end-of-life research, working on SMART (Self-Management of Analgesia and Related Treatments at the end-of-life) funded by the Health Technology Assessment programme of the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR).  The study focused on the development and feasibility testing of an educational intervention to improve the supported self-management of opioids and the related side-effects of nausea, constipation and drowsiness.  She guided the qualitative components of the study, including design, data collection and analysis.  Following SMART, Natasha combined work in two end-of-life specific areas.  Firstly, Supporting Family Caregivers at End of Life, funded by the NIHR’s School for Social Care Research.  The study implemented evidence about how to support family caregivers in the transition between hospital and home for end-of-life care.  Natasha led the implementation via palliative and end-of-life care teams within 12 NHS hospitals across England.  Secondly, she collaborated on a programme of work focused on treatment decisions in the face of patient deterioration in hospital: development and implementation of treatment escalation plans, funded by NIHR CLAHRC (Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care) Wessex.  Natasha directed a complex retrospective case note review and in-depth analysis examining escalation related decision-making in acute deterioration at the end-of-life.  Natasha then worked on ActMed (Accessing Medicines at end-of-life), a multi-stakeholder, mixed method evaluation of service provision funded by the Health Services and Delivery Research programme of the NIHR, for which she was a co-investigator.  She led a programme of work that examined the supply of medicines into community pharmacy. 

In 2020 she was appointed to the role of lecturer within the pre-registration nursing team, responsible for the module leadership of palliative and end-of-life care in the BSc and MN curriculum. Currently she co-leads a programme of research focused on co-producing and implementing a novel web-based intervention to support families and friends bereaved during COVID-19 and beyond.  The intervention is underpinned by robust family focused theory and has received support from the National Bereavement Alliance.