Applications open for NIHR School for Primary Care Research-funded summer internships 2025

12 March 2025

We have two exciting summer internship opportunities for UK undergraduates, irrespective of degree discipline, who are interested in primary care research. These are a fantastic opportunity to get hands-on experience conducting primary care research with experts in the field.

The offer

The NIHR School for Primary Care Research (SPCR) Student Internship Programme provides students with experience in a research environment and access to a team of specialised mentors and supervisors.

There are 18 internships on offer across the nine member institutions of the SPCR. We will be hosting two here in Bristol.

Information about the choice of three projects, supervisors and duration are given below. Please contact supervisors for an informal discussion if you would like to know more about one of these projects.

The rate paid to all interns will be the living wage of £12.60/hr or £13.85/hr for students living in London, or those who undertake a placement in London with a requirement to travel to the university campus. Other costs (such as conference attendance, travel etc) will not be covered. Placements are for a maximum of 140 hours across the agreed duration and working hours and will be paid in two instalments.

Placements can start from 9 June 2024 and must be completed by 31 March 2026.

How to apply

For further details and how to apply, visit the NIHR School for Primary Care Research website.

Applications close at 1pm on 25 March 2025.

Please share the details with anyone you think might be interested.

Bristol projects

Below is a summary of the projects on offer at the Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol. Full details about each project are available on the NIHR School for Primary Care Research website.

1. Creating a research dataset for sharing and re-use: the IMPPP trial dataset

Open Science advocates for open access to research, including data that has been generated or captured through a trial. In the UK there has been a movement toward adopting open science with increasing expectation amongst funders and publishers of health and social care research that data be made available for re-use. We are currently preparing a dataset collected through the Improving Medicines use in People with Polypharmacy in Primary Care – The IMPPP trial so that it can be used by other researchers for secondary analysis.

You will be supported to prepare a data deposit of the IMPPP trial data for the University of Bristol Research Data Repository. This will include discussion of ethical considerations, how to contextualise a research dataset with useful metadata and develop guides to enable use of a secondary research dataset.

• Supervisors: Barbara Caddick and Debbie McCahon
• Duration: 4-week period any time from Monday 14 July. (We will consider requests for this to be worked over a longer period on a part-time basis.)

2. Skin and allergy research in primary care

This is an opportunity for an ambitious undergraduate student looking for hands-on experience in cutting-edge applied research. The intern will be able to embed themselves with an active, multi-disciplinary research group of 20 people (Centre for Applied Excellence in Skin and Allergy Research, CAESAR) tackling real-world challenges. CAESAR sits within the Centre for Academic Primary Care and focuses on improving the diagnosis and treatment of common skin and allergy problems in primary care, with a particular emphasis on childhood eczema and food allergies. The intern will join a multidisciplinary team and observe and involve themselves in the following on-going programmes of research:

• Supervisors: Phuong Hua, Roxanne Parslow, Raquel Granell and Andrew Turner
• Duration: 4 weeks, summer 2025 (June-July 2025)

3. Developing work investigating the buildings and spaces of general practice

The general practice estate comprises a huge variety of different types of building across England. It is estimated that around 22% buildings that are currently in use were built before the founding of the NHS in 1948. Despite calls to invest in infrastructure, the buildings of general practice are under-researched and very little is understood about the ways in which these physical spaces shape and affect the care that is delivered within them.

We have received development funding to inform our work investigating the buildings and interior spaces of general practice. We will hold a series of workshops with staff and patients who use these buildings to jointly identify research priorities and co-develop questions for our future work. The student intern will work with us to design and deliver patient and public involvement (PPI) and stakeholder workshops, to attend workshops (where possible), to contribute to writing up notes and reports and designing future research in this area.

• Supervisor: Barbara Caddick
• Duration: 4-week period any time from Monday 14 July. (We will consider requests for this to be worked over a longer period on a part-time basis.)

Further information

About the Centre for Academic Primary Care

The Centre for Academic Primary Care (CAPC) at the University of Bristol is a leading centre for primary care research in the UK, one of ten forming the NIHR School for Primary Care Research. It sits within Bristol Medical School, an internationally recognised centre of excellence for population health research and teaching. Follow on Bluesky: @capcbristol.bsky.social and LinkedIn.

About the NIHR

The mission of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) is to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research. We do this by:

Funding high quality, timely research that benefits the NHS, public health and social care;
Investing in world-class expertise, facilities and a skilled delivery workforce to translate discoveries into improved treatments and services;
Partnering with patients, service users, carers and communities, improving the relevance, quality and impact of our research;
Attracting, training and supporting the best researchers to tackle complex health and social care challenges;
Collaborating with other public funders, charities and industry to help shape a cohesive and globally competitive research system;
Funding applied global health research and training to meet the needs of the poorest people in low and middle income countries.

NIHR is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. Its work in low and middle income countries is principally funded through UK Aid from the UK government.