Research Fellowship: Waikato Hospital Department of Anaesthesia and Pain Medicine

Our department has a wide research expertise, covering numerous past and ongoing research projects; ranging from laboratory-based science to clinical trials.

The applicant should have a strong desire to learn scientific methods in order to: deepen their critical appraisal of the literature, and also to participate in the discovery of new knowledge pertaining to the practice of anaesthesia.

The exact details of the programme will be settled by discussion with the applicant – and will depend on their previous experience and interests. We would hope that this experience might lead on to the applicant doing higher degrees (MSc or PhD).

In general, the research fellow would learn about the process of research by:

• Helping with the day-to-day tasks in various ongoing departmental studies, and
• Develop a small project of their own. This would involve the organization of either a small clinical physiological study or a laboratory-based study; and would include the process of obtaining institutional approvals/funding, design of the data collection process and consultation, conduct of the study, analysis and interpretation of the results, writing up the paper, and presentation at a meeting. [Because of the slow process in obtaining institutional approvals, these need to be initiated well before the start of the fellowship]
• Participation in weekly departmental research and methodology discussions.

Specifically the fellow would be mentored by the clinician who is in charge of the study, as well as by Professor Sleigh and other researchers in the department.

In one year it would be expected that the fellow should have attended and presented at a scientific meeting, and written up and submitted a paper for publication in the scientific literature – and thus being well on the way to becoming  a world expert in their chosen subject...