3 PhD positions soon to be announced

OCHER lead Pål Gulbrandsen has received one grant from the Norwegian Research Council (NRC) that will fund 2 PhD students for 3 years, and one grant from Helse Sør-Øst (Southeast Norway Regional Hospital Trust – HSØ) covering 1 PhD student for 3 years.

The NRC project will explore medication information quality when older patients hospitalized with heart failure are discharged to their homes. We will apply audiotapes of doctor/patient conversations, interviews, collection of written material, home visits, and questionnaires in a mixed methods approach. The study will require complex and comprehensive longitudinal data collection.

The HSØ project aims to study how 1st year residents deal with and communicate about uncertainty. We will apply questionnaires, field work with extensive use of audiotapes and interviews to increase understanding of characteristics of persons, situations, reasoning, and possible remedies to help residents’ quicker adaptation of good ways to handle uncertainty.

The PhD students will have to be very well organized, able to communicate and collaborate with an array of people, and with analytical minds. We hope to be able to announce the positions within 2 months. We will consider a background in medicine or psychology an advantage, but are open to others with relevant backgrounds. Unfortunately, we cannot employ people without excellent working knowledge of a Scandinavian language, because data collection will include interviews with older Norwegian patients and ability to pick up important uncertainty cues during field work.

If you consider yourself a future applicant, please send and e-mail to Pål Gulbrandsen, who will consider sharing the project description with you. You will find the address at uio.no.