‘Meaningful change for our patients’ - research interns share their experiences

Internships at University Hospital Southampton (UHS) are giving healthcare professionals their first taste of working in research. For others, they are providing a springboard, allowing them to take the next step in their research career.

The hospital’s Southampton Academy of Research (SoAR) and NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) Wessex fund research internships each year.

These give individuals or teams across Wessex, including at UHS, the opportunity to focus on research.

The internships allow people to do research alongside their clinical work. Providing up to £10,000 in funding, they cover at least one day a week for six months, alongside pre-agreed training and development activities.

On National Intern Day 2025, some of our research interns share why they applied, what they are doing, and what they hope to achieve.

Olivia is the Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) lead for the General Intensive Care and Surgery service at UHS. She supports patients with swallowing and communication difficulties after critical illness or surgery. She is also Research Lead for the SLT department.

For her internship, she is completing a scoping review. This will look at whether age or frailty can help predict the severity of patients' dysphagia (swallowing difficulties) and recovery.

“The internship was the perfect opportunity to pursue a small research project whilst maintaining my patient-facing role. I'm hoping that, in doing both, I can translate my findings into meaningful change for our patients.”

Laura ensures that radiotherapy treatments are safe and accurate. She also supports research and development activities, particularly in scientific computing. She does this through in-house software development and testing. Laura applied for the Team Award.

Her team’s research project aims to improve workflow efficiency. They are co-designing, developing and testing an intelligent task allocation algorithm. This aims to distribute workflow efficiently and fairly across clinical staff. It will determine the optimal match between available staff and outstanding tasks. The team would also like to develop workload forecasting and data analytics features.

“This is the first step in research for me. While I don’t yet have a fully concrete plan for what comes next, I intend to apply the skills I’ve gained during this internship to future projects.”

JJ is the lead physiotherapist for the breathing pattern disorder service within the Respiratory Centre at UHS. She helps patients with chronic respiratory conditions manage their breathing.

She uses treatments such as airway clearance, breathing pattern retraining and exercise.

For her internship, she is continuing her co-design and patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) work on patient education videos. These will support the Living better with asthma study (LIBERTY), and may be used in further trials in the future.

“My internship will allow me to further develop my research skills and give me time to focus on clinical effectiveness and quality improvement, to develop services through engagement with patients. Afterwards, I hope to apply for a NIHR Doctoral fellowship, to continue developing my clinical academic career.”

Jo works on the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at Southampton Children’s Hospital. This includes being part of the Southampton Oxford Retrieval Team (SORT), and ensuring critically ill children are ready to be transferred to PICU for ongoing management.

During her internship, she is exploring factors that affect the retention of experienced Paediatric Advanced Critical Care Practitioners (ACCPs). This will include a scoping exercise and discussions with ACCPs. She also hopes to identify potential supervisors for a future PhD.

“This internship will afford me time to undertake this scoping exercise, in preparation for a PhD application and a future clinical academic career.”

Angus discusses treatments with patients and doctors to start appropriate medications, as well as review drug charts to optimise currently prescribed ones. He also adjusts medications when patients come to hospital, based on features such as acute kidney injuries.

For his internship, he is looking at ways to improve clozapine safety for patients newly admitted to hospital. He aims to find out if he enjoys working in research. With no previous experience of research, the internship provides a valuable opportunity to practice and improve his skills.

“If I find I enjoy this style of work, I would like to look at pain relief. Specifically opioid therapy and how the pharmacy team can help reduce the opioid burden in society.”

In her clinical role, Jennifer is part of the Critical Care Pharmacy team. She provides pharmaceutical care for some of the most unwell patients in the hospital. She also has a management role, where she works with early carers pharmacists to develop their future carers.

During her work with early carers pharmacists, Jennifer facilitated listening sessions. These raised issues she felt needed investigating further. Her internship gives her the time to do this.

“I will undertake qualitative interviews with early carers pharmacists to develop an understanding of their experiences. By doing this, I hope to improve our development processes at UHS, and link them with national credentialling programmes.”