HSRU offers summer student work placements to current University of Aberdeen students wishing to improve their knowledge and experience in a research-focused environment.
This year we welcome 8 student interns, 4 working on projects with the CHaRT programming team and 4 working on Health Services Research projects.
Alex Zabala Findlay and Sam Alexander have commenced their internships and have provided an insight into their research projects.
Alex Zabala Findlay
My name if Alex Zabala Findlay and I have just graduated with a BSc in Pharmacology. As an intern at HSRU I hope to learn about health research while working with my supervisors, Katie Banister and Beatriz Goulao. My short 8-week project will consist of carrying out systematic reviews to gather information on the way diagnostic test accuracy studies are presented, focusing on plain language summaries. The aim is to produce guidance on the creation of plain language summaries, to hopefully aid their implementation into publication of diagnostic accuracy studies and to make the results more accessible to non-experts.
Sam Alexander
My name is Sam Alexander, I am a 1st year Medicine student at the University and I am one of the summer interns at the HSRU working with Seonaidh, Ruth, Lynda and Suzanne. I am working on two projects: recruitment profiles of trials and why trials get suspended. The project looking at recruitment profiles of trials aims to collate data about recruitment at each site and determine whether the anecdote that “50% of the participants are recruited from 20% of the recruitment sites; and 80% of the participants are recruited from 50% of the recruitment sites” holds true. The project examining why trials get suspended will aim to identify the reasoning and establish whether the suspended trials publish. The overarching aim of the internship is to see if unnecessary trial suspension could be mitigated.
Welcome to all our student interns and we hope you enjoy your summer placement with HSRU.