Binge drinking in social groups is common among young women. This study will develop a recruitment strategy and a gender and age sensitive group intervention to tackle binge drinking among women aged 18 - 34 years. If successful, the intervention will subsequently be tested in a full scale trial. The long term aim of the full study is to reduce the frequency of binge drinking among young women, many of whom are not aware that they drink at harmful levels. This community-based feasibility study will be conducted in two phases. Phase one involves designing and testing a community based recruitment strategy. It will recruit participants through existing community groups and networks; adverts on two local radio stations; and a poster campaign. A graphic designer will work with the team to create posters and leaflets to advertise the study. Phase one will also develop the novel group intervention. The intervention is based on current psychological theories of behaviour change. The components of the intervention will be woven into fun social activities. Lay people will be trained to deliver the intervention. Six focus groups with young women will be convened to assist in the development of the recruitment strategy and the intervention. The intervention has several innovative features that make it attractive to the target group. It is tailored for young women and capitalises on enhancing existing social networks and support systems that exist within social groups. The intervention augments the brief alcohol intervention, which is commonly used to reduce alcohol consumption. It uses the Health Action Process Approach which is designed to lead to behaviour change through three steps: promoting motivation to change; setting goals and implementing intentions to change; and devising coping plans and relapse prevention strategies. Thus the intervention will be delivered over three sessions. Fun group activities, which reinforce the three components of the intervention, will form the basis for the sessions: making alcohol free cocktails, a makeup demonstration and a relaxation class. Employing trained lay peers to deliver the intervention, will make the study more appealing to the participants. Motivation to change will be generated using motivational interviewing techniques. The women will be encouraged to make specific plans to change their behaviour and to think about ways to overcome barriers to change. Phase 2 uses a before and after study design to assess whether the components of the intervention are likely to reduce the frequency of binge drinking. Young women who regularly drink together will be invited to participate in the study in groups (three to eight people). In total 20 pre-existing social groups will be recruited. Groups with different characteristics will be recruited eg work colleagues; young mothers; students; and unemployed young women from areas of high deprivation. Women will be interviewed by telephone three months after the intervention. The study will use a range of measures to assess the acceptability of the study and its potential to be an effective strategy to reduce harmful drinking. The frequency of binge drinking (6 or more units of alcohol in a single session) in the previous 30 days will be measured at baseline and three months after the intervention. The study will also assess the impact of the study on perceptions of harms, the perceived benefits of moderated drinking; and beliefs in ability to reduce binge drinking. The extent to which the women made plans to reduce the frequency of binge drinking will be measured. The impact of the group support systems in influencing both individual and group drinking behaviour will also be assessed. As recruitment to community-based interventions is typically low, a market penetration survey of 300 young women exposed to the advertising campaign will also be conducted, to assess the impact of the advertising campaign.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third cause of cancer death worldwide. In 2018, about 1.8 million new cases were reported worldwide with a mortality of almost 900,000. This has increased more than 30% since 2012. Studies have shown that regular screening and early detection can reduce mortality by up to 70%. The proposed project will undertake interdisciplinary research to design a low-cost, disposable, autonomous Soft Endorobot (SoftEn) to examine the lower intestine painlessly. SoftEn offers disruptive potential to replace the current optical colonoscopy (OC), including a dual capability of investigation and performance of autonomous surgical tasks. SoftEn will overcome OC's limitations (operator-dependent, patient pain/discomfort, high costs, decontamination). Crucially, the high level of autonomy will reduce the time in performing the procedure as well as shift screening process from secondary to intermediate or primary care, thus saving precious time for diagnosis and intervention. Advantages of this approach are: 1. Efficiency of the procedure will be augmented by reducing the human-operator skills required to perform the procedure. This will increase the number of procedures performed every year. 2. Reducing the waiting list will consequently improve the CRC stage of detection and will increase the patient survivability due to early intervention and reduced cost of treatment. 3. Less pain and discomfort will increase the patient acceptability of the screening as well as patient experience. This has the potential to make sedation unnecessary, which in turn would make hospital visits shorter. 4. Autonomous robot examination of the large intestine would remove restrictions of the traditional operator-dependent OC and would enable an increased access to investigation. Optical diagnosis and tissue diagnosis could be achieved in most of the procedures, including patients requiring more advanced intervention. 5. Potentially improve screening uptake through reducing barriers to participation. 6. The use of polymers implies a reduction in production costs, allowing the device to be single-use and avoiding additional costs required for a traditional OC, including sterilisation and reprocessing. This will reduce the UK cost in CRC procedures. 7. AI software will allow the endorobot to perform procedures autonomously. A clinician can therefore supervise several devices and intervene only if needed via an external ergonomic control console, locally or remotely. This will limit the use of clinicians' time and increase the number of investigations performed per day. Additionally, more clinicians will be able to perform the procedure supporting the national endoscopy workflow.

The 'Art at the Start' project has been offering arts therapy and creative play sessions to promote the health and wellbeing of parents and 0-3 year old infants within Dundee Contemporary Arts gallery. During our project, we have managed to reach families who don't traditionally visit art galleries and have helped parents who have had difficulties bonding with their children to connect to together with them through shared art making. We have evidenced positive changes in the quality of family wellbeing via questionnaires, interviews and observations of family interactions which focus on the experience of the infant. Our project has been listed as an example of best public health practise and won several public engagement prizes. The proposed research scales up this successful approach, embedding four art therapists within four arts galleries across Scotland to explore whether the 'Art at the Start' model can be successfully repeated in different settings, widening access to arts spaces and supporting parents and infants across Scotland to build secure relationships. The NHS rely on community spaces to help them provide the first line of support for families with young children who are struggling with their wellbeing, but don't yet qualify for urgent clinical care. However, a special task force put together by the government to support parents and infants' mental health recognises that 'community' interventions need to be more sustainably resourced. In order to gain funding, services like ours need a strong evidence base. By bringing together researchers from psychology, arts and arts education, we hope to explore how we can both quantify and qualify the impact of our service; explaining how effective it is, how and where it works, and why. We will do this by gathering information on how people feel before and after engaging with our service, and by exploring which groups of people tend to visit the galleries before and after our out-reach programme. This is important, because access to arts is known to have a protective impact on health and wellbeing, but many marginalised groups in our community struggle to access cultural spaces. Although we have planned how to measure our outcomes, our research programme will also adapt as we go, taking into account the perspectives of gallery staff, local communities and NHS teams gathered in regular 'stakeholder' meetings. At the centre of this 'action research' approach is our art therapy team, who have been trained to reflexively adapt the service they provide depending on their clients' needs and local conditions. This will help us to learn how our service can be adapted to different cultural settings. Our ultimate aim is to showcase to the Scottish Government how we can use the power of the arts to provide a cost-effective solution for public health and wellbeing. Giving children the best start in life is important, because our parents teach us how to interact with others, and the love they provide is essential for us to develop academic and social competence. Poor starts in life can be passed down through generations, and the 'Art at the Start' model offers a way to break this cycle. Since both early relationships and access to the arts have been shown to have protective benefits for health and wellbeing, our intervention stands to have a long-term impact on the lives of the families we reach. To ensure that this powerful impact is heard by those who design and fund parent and infant mental health services, and by the cultural spaces which might host such interventions, we have planned a number of key outputs, including academic papers, a professional magazine article aimed at the gallery sector, and a policy paper summarising the project's outcomes to be presented in person and in writing to gallery, government and NHS teams. This will help us to show how arts and science perspectives can be brought together to present creative solutions to public health problems.

In order to deliver business as normal performance, healthcare care providers will need to reconfigure almost all services (many currently in abeyance) to accommodate the future challenges of covid-19 (For example; pulsed lock-downs, isolation of the vulnerable, new testing & tracing regimes, disrupted supply chains, new working practices & new spatial demands on facilities). Quality Improvement (QI) approaches currently provide a research informed framework of tools for local innovation in healthcare. A wide variety of QI tools currently support NHS QI work, drawn from sectors like manufacturing. Over the last 12 months NHS Tayside has integrated a services of additional QI tools based on Service Design into its QI Programmes. These design approaches work alongside established QI tools to map the service-user (patient) perspective. This proposal describes the development of an online QI tool that will support the challenge of mapping, evaluating and reconfiguring services that take account of the evolving risks & challenges of COVID-19. NHS Tayside will provide the platform for tool development, NHS Education for Scotland (NES) will provide specialist QI guidance & access to wide networks for dissemination. UoStrathclyde will provide service design research expertise. Development will involve: capturing lessons learnt from recently established COVID-19 pathways, integration of proven service design tools with established risk management tools, collation of research into COVID-19 risks and mitigations, synthesis and testing of tool templates and development of online training to deliver the new tool in a QI context. Tool effectiveness will be evaluated. Knowledge gained will be valuable and widely transferable to other service sectors within the service economy, challenged with redesigning & implementing COVID-19 mitigations.

Stroke is a leading cause of disability and mortality all over the world: for example, someone in the UK has a stroke every 3.5 seconds. Clinical advances have decreased its mortality rate; however, the provision of rehabilitation to meet current demand, whilst improving patient outcomes related to care and quality of life, is still in critical demand globally. With over 15 million cases annually worldwide, 5 million people are left with a permanent disability every year. It is estimated that, between 2015 and 2035, excluding consequences associated with Covid-19, an increase of 60% in cases and a rise of 250% in social care costs to £65 billion is predicted. However, this figure is likely to increase due to the pandemic (attributable to Covid-19 directly and because of changes in lifestyle). This rapidly increasing number of stroke survivors is creating a significant demand for rehabilitation services, causing a considerable burden on an already stretched system. If new approaches to accurately predict motor recovery and to set realistic rehabilitation goals for patients are not developed urgently, these numbers will continue to grow exponentially. Innovative approaches, such as distinct characteristics of the body (electrophysiological biomarkers) that can be measured to predict recovery, accelerate recovery rate, and allow for patient-centred rehabilitation regimes, could dramatically increase the efficiency and effectiveness of rehabilitation and stroke management. The proposed research aims to be the first to utilise specific patterns of activity from patients' muscles following stroke, to accurately evaluate motor impairment and use this to guide and optimise therapeutic input. This project will be a step-change compared to current stroke management and will develop new and accurate patient-centred approaches that will address this potential multi-billion pound healthcare crisis and radically improve patients' quality of life following stroke. This approach has the potential to also be used in rehabilitation therapies for a range of other related conditions (e.g. Lewy body dementia, Parkinson's disease) and injuries (e.g. incomplete spinal cord injuries) and so could make a significant contribution to quality of life for a large number of patients.