Throughout August, the SDRC are publishing a series of blogs from PhD Students/ Early Career Researchers in dementia and brain health. 

For the first week, we are featuring those that were in the SDRC Impact Report 2019.  Our final blog this week is by Catriona Ingram, a PhD studying informatics in dementia and brain health, part of the Scottish Dementia Informatics Partnership theme. 

I am currently a ST4 Higher Trainee in Old Age Psychiatry in the West of Scotland.  I have also recently spent a year doing the Scottish Clinical Leadership Fellowship working with the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland in the Scottish Government and with Healthcare Improvement Scotland. 

Through my time in this fellowship it was evident that having relevant data was incredibly valuable in the development of health services.  Likewise I see in my day to day clinical work that better quality up-to-date data could be extremely useful in terms of the information that could be presented to patients and used in clinical decision making. 

I was therefore really excited to hear about the development of the SDIP which aims to allow us to use data more effectively to improve clinical care, widen research opportunities for people living with dementia and help to inform policy.

So far I have been involved with the initial evaluation work of the Edinburgh Memory Assessment and Treatment Service and how they are recruiting to the Scottish Brain Health Register (SBHR).  This has involved interviews with staff and qualitative thematic analysis.  I have also discussed the development of SDIP with relevant groups such as the Focus on Dementia Team at Healthcare Improvement Scotland and Old Age Psychiatrists in the West of Scotland. 

I have contributed to developing questionnaires to people currently on the SBHR which we hope will provide useful feedback on their experience of being on the register. I look forward to continuing to contribute to the evaluation of SDIP as the project progresses.

Follow the SDRC on Twitter so you can keep up to date with the Early Career researcher blog series.

If you are an Early Career Researcher or student that would like to write a guest blog for the SDRC, get in touch at sdrc@alzscot.org