Manchester

Pharmacists are playing increasingly clinical roles in primary care, including community pharmacy. Increasing numbers of pharmacists become independent prescribers (IP), and from 2026 all newly qualified pharmacists will register with an IP annotation. Pharmacy technicians are also gaining increasing levels of responsibility and are crucial in supporting pharmacists to deliver high quality clinical, patient-facing services.

At the Centre for Pharmacy Workforce Studies (CPWS), often in collaboration with the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE), we undertake studies to evaluate and inform pharmacy policy and practice. These studies are often mix-methods and, besides being informed by existing evidence, commonly involve quantitative (surveys) and qualitative (interviews, focus groups) elements. We have a number of such studies currently ongoing. One example is our study PREPARE (Pharmacy Readiness for ExPAnded Roles & Enhanced care). This involves interviews with community pharmacy contractors/ owners and a census survey of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to investigate how ready they are community pharmacies’ roles in neighbourhoods – under the 10 Year Health Plan

our studies will offer an opportunity for an intern to experience being part of a research team (CPWS), and offer excellent insights into engaging with existing evidence, informing study design, collecting and analysing data. An intern may also have the opportunity to support with our application for university ethics committee approval and possibly some secondary data analysis. We would hope that an intern could do things that add value to the overall work beyond what has been commissioned.

This internship will support analysis for the Volitional Help Sheet (VHS) project, a digital intervention designed to reduce self-harm among adolescent, by focusing on coping strategies. The project aims to understand how young people perceive, experience, and accept the mobile app version of VHS. The intern will work with existing qualitative datasets (‘Think Aloud’ interviews) to explore young people’s views on usability, acceptability, engagement, and perceived impact of the app.

Working closely with the research team, the intern will assist in organising, coding, and thematically analysing the data using established qualitative methods. They will help identify key themes relating to digital mental health support, barriers and facilitators to app use, and recommendations for refinement of the VHS. The project provides an excellent opportunity to gain hands-on experience with qualitative analysis in a real-world mental health study, contribute to ongoing research on adolescent self-harm prevention, and develop insight into the design and evaluation of digital health interventions.

The internship will suit students interested in mental health, digital innovation, or applied qualitative research. There will be 15-20 interview transcripts to analyse which will be feasible within the 4 week timeline. There will be opportunities to contribute to academic papers and/or conference presentations after the internship if the student would like to.