About

Me & Prague

I am Hannah Family, 2nd year PhD student at the University of Bath. I am a graduate psychologist (BSc Psych, MSc Neuropsych) and for the last three years or so I have been working as a research assistant / PhD student for the pharmacy practice group.

I am supervised by Dr Jane Sutton & Prof Marjorie Weiss who have been fantastic mentors throughout my PhD so far.

Although I am not a pharmacist by training I quickly came to realise through working with Jane on other projects that there are many areas of pharmacy practice which may benefit from the application of psychological theory. Jane like me is a psychologist, although her area of specialism is occupational psychology whilst in what seems like another life now, I had spent a year specialising in neuropsychology before I came to work with the pharmacy practice group. There are large amounts of cross over between occupational psychology and neuropsychology, most often captured within the sub-discipline of psychology known as human factors. Human factors specialists apply knowledge of how our brains work from neuropsychological and cognitive psychology research to occupational psychology research and apply all this knowledge to work settings. The reasoning being that we know roughly what parameters our brains like working within and sometimes work systems, or organisations are designed in such a way that don’t match these parameters (e.g. work pace is too fast, noisy environments, computer systems that are disorganised and hard to read) which can cause sub-optimal performance of our cognitive processes. So put simply (or the way I understand it) is that human factors experts spend a lot of time making sure that systems are designed in a way that works with our brains. This is to some extent the perspective that I come from, however having spent some time now working within pharmacy practice I am beginning to understand the intricacies of the systems that pharmacists work with.

On this blog/these pages you will find information about the bits and pieces of research I have been involved in, my publication (I hope soon to be plural!) and presentations to date. There is a separate blog/website for the research I am currently undertaking in collaboration with Dr Sutton and Prof Weiss. This website is called “errorgirl.com” simply because the key aim of this research is to look at the link between mental workload (a measure of how much work your brain is doing at any one time to carry out a task) and dispensing errors in community pharmacies. 

Every so often I get the opportunity to assist with some of the undergraduate students modules or help out with workshops for postgraduate students, in the main this involves being a teaching assistant on the 4th year health psychology for pharmacy module and the 2nd year statistics for behavioural sciences module so I will post updates on these activities as and when they occur, as well as start a depository of useful information, links, interesting research etc on these topics!

Please get in touch with me if you want to discuss my research / take part in one of my studies / comment on the content on here.

Disclaimer
All work, unless otherwise referenced, is my own and should be quoted as such. Please do not replicate, distribute or use any part of my blog without contacting me first. Everything I write here is my own opinion and does not necessarily represent the opinions held by the University of Bath, my colleagues, collaborators or anyone else. All unattributed photographs are my own (or my husband’s – as he has a very snazzy camera), please let me know if you’d like to use them elsewhere.