Health and Wellbeing

The Health and Wellbeing pathway welcomes applications that focus on priorities around enhancing wellbeing, understanding health behaviours across the life course, rethinking delivery of public and third sector services for health and social care, addressing health inequalities and developing inclusive communities at a range of levels from local to global. Our international partnerships and close working relationships across a wide range of countries from North America to Australasia, Europe, West Africa, South Asia and China, offer students significant opportunity to undertake overseas research, including comparative studies and visits.

We work closely with the WHO, the EU, the NHS, Social Care, private and third sector organisations as well as other local and national government agencies and international bodies. These links, combined with major research centres within each of four universities of Keele, Lancaster, Liverpool and Manchesterdemonstrate the opportunities for national and international opportunities to carry out high quality PhD research with excellent supervision in health and wellbeing.

Programmes eligible for NWSSDTP funding

The list below includes all Master’s programmes that are eligible for NWSSDTP funding and the typical PhD programmes that are supported under this pathway. Other PhD programmes within these universities may be considered – please reach out to the relevant Pathway Representative (see contact details below) or the NWSSDTP Office if the PhD programme you are interested in is not listed here. Please note that the NWSSDTP does not fund standalone Master’s programmes – these can only be funded as part of a Master’s + PhD Studentship.

Keele University

Lancaster University

University of Liverpool

University of Manchester

For information on how to apply for funding, please visit our How to Apply page.

Pathway Representatives

Contact details for Health and Wellbeing Pathway Representatives can be found here: https://nwssdtp.ac.uk/about/contact-us/pathway-leads/

Current Health and Wellbeing Pathway Students and Alumni

Tamsin Fisher (2017 Cohort) 

Young people’s wellbeing and autotelic practices: a narrative and go-along inquiry of youth activities

This is an investigation into how young people maintain their well-being through leisure activities. Participant observation, workshops, time-diaries and interviews will be used to develop Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow experience (1990,1997) and Rautio’s theory of autotelic activities (2013). The aims are to understand how young people engage with self-care activities and how specific activities are effective for maintaining well-being.

Amardeep Legha (2020 Cohort)

Longitudinal trajectories of work absence: bridging the gap between health and work

Absence from work due to ill-health is one of the biggest causes of productivity loss across the UK. To address this problem, this PhD aims to help clinicians offer targeted support to patients earlier than normally possible. Statistical methods to model common patterns (trajectories) of work absence using a large national electronic health record database will be compared.

Emma Randall (2020 Cohort)

The Nature Nurse: The practices of eco-therapy, wild interactions and wellbeing

I was awarded +3 studentship via NWSSDTP’s Health and Wellbeing Pathway in 2020. My research will develop critical geographical scholarship on nature to identify how being in nature is experienced through examining different practices of eco-therapy. This research will focus on encounters with birds in natural settings and how these non-human encounters can foster resilience and wellbeing in people.

Vincy Huang (2020 Cohort)

Health Impact of Nicotine & Tobacco (HINT): a microsimulation decision-support tool for local and national tobacco control policies in England

The aim of my project is to develop a microsimulation decision support tool to aid tobacco control policy makers at the local and national levels. This tool will quantify the health, economics and equity impact of tobacco policies. The result will be visualised in a user-friendly web-based user-interface.

Daisy Harvey (2020 Cohort)

The Language of Risk-Taking in Bipolar

This research uses computational linguistic methods to learn more about risky behaviours in bipolar from lived experience interviews, Reddit posts and medical records.  We aim to understand how risk-taking in bipolar is understood and managed by people with a diagnosis to see where further support is needed and help improve the overall quality of life for people living with bipolar. 

Anamitra Bhowmick (2022 Cohort)

Co-construction of oral healthcare knowledge in a Merseyside neighbourhood: an ethnography and visual methods study of inter-generational knowledge practices in a community setting.

This project seeks to understand knowledge practices around oral-healthcare services in a local community: Feelgood factory, Netherton, Liverpool, comparing groups across genders and generations. Recent approaches to ‘health knowledge as a social practice’ focus on co-construction and exchange of knowledge. This research study will investigate how various forms of knowledge around oral-healthcare services are exchanged or co-constructed in a local community?

Eliana Chavarría Pino (2021 Cohort)

Analysing the effect of health policies in low-income settings: evidence on child and maternal health from Mozambique

My PhD aims to evaluate the effect of health policies, specifically those related to health system inputs and financing, on maternal and child health outcomes in low-income settings using Mozambique as a case study. I will employ robust econometric methods to analyse the data and draw meaningful conclusions. By exploring the relationship between health policies and health outcomes, I intend to contribute valuable insights that can inform evidence-based decision-making in Mozambique and other similar settings.

Katherine Blumer (2021 Cohort)

The role of improvisation-based musical activity with people living with dementia

Improvisation-based musical activity is frequently used to facilitate sessions with people living with dementia in a variety of community and care settings. This PhD project aims to examine the phenomena of improvisation, how it is utilised within musical sessions with people living with dementia, and how musicians facilitate this process of improvisation within practice.

Jack Benton (2017 Cohort)

Impact of urban green spaces on physical activity and wellbeing

Jack is using natural experiment methodology in to evaluate the impact of urban green space interventions on physical activity and wellbeing, working with a local housing association and a real estate company. Jack is also developing a tool for systematically observing physical activity and two other wellbeing behaviours in urban spaces, such as pocket parks, residential streets and canal waterways.

Marty Parker (2017 Cohort)

Investigating population health and well-being through estimation of Healthy Working Life Expectancy in England

Healthy Working Life Expectancy (HWLE) is an estimate of the number of years that people can stay healthy and in work. This project will use multi-state interpolated Markov chain modelling to (i) estimate HWLE and (ii) identify factors that reduce HWLE. Further work will model trends in HWLE over the next 20 years.

Roze Witkam (2019 Cohort)

Sociodemographic factors relating to obesity and arthritis in the UK

My research aims to understand the complex relationship between social determinants, obesity and arthritis by investigating how sociodemographic factors mediate, moderate or confound the relationship between obesity and arthritis. I will use three longitudinal cohorts (Understanding Society, English Longitudinal Study of Aging and the Norfolk Arthritis Registry) encompassing individuals from a wide range of society.

Stephanie Ray (2024 Cohort)

Creating ways to #BeeWell: examining the relationship between young people’s participation in arts, culture and entertainment activities and their wellbeing

Investigating the potential impact that engaging in arts and creative activities can have on young people’s wellbeing. In particular, my project uses mixed methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the Factory International Schools Programme on participating young people’s wellbeing.