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Posted on 20 May 2021

Congratulations to Dr Rebecca O’Brien, Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapist, working in our  Adult speech and language therapy service who has won an Institute of Mental Health Publication Award. The award is for her publication ‘When people living with dementia say ‘no’: Negotiating refusal in the acute hospital setting, in the best publication flowing from work during doctoral studies or as part of a doctoral dissertation category.

The Annual Publication Awards highlight the best mental health research publications of 2020. The awards aim to celebrate and promote the publications produced in the fields of mental health or intellectual disability research by people working within Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, the University of Nottingham or affiliated to the Institute of Mental Health.

Alongside her work at the Trust Rebecca is also the Senior Research Fellow /Programme Manager PrAISED Programme, School of Medicine, University of Nottingham.

Rebecca summarises the paper below:

“Healthcare professionals in acute hospitals are not generally trained in how to communicate with people with dementia. This has an impact on their job satisfaction and stress levels. People with dementia and their relatives also report dissatisfaction with communication in hospital. We looked to address that and improve the experience of people with dementia when in hospital.

This study is about helping to give healthcare professionals the skills to make requests in different ways. We also want policymakers to understand the importance of the need to train staff in communication skills.”

You can read the full publication here: https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/alert/hospital-patients-dementia-careful-phrasing-cut-refusals/

About her win, Rebecca said:

“It’s always exciting to have your work published and wonder what impact it will have on clinical practice, but it’s even more special to have an award that acknowledges it as a high quality paper. I hope the extra publicity for the paper will help to spread the word about the practical importance of research into communication in healthcare settings.