The DASH Study awarded Burdett Trust for Nursing Award.

School of Healthcare Sciences researchers Dr Clare Bennett and Professor Daniel Kelly are delighted to have been awarded a Burdett Trust for Nursing Award for the DASH Study: Digital interventions for Adolescent Sexual Health.

The Burdett Trust for Nursing Award was created to acknowledge and celebrate inspirational Nursing teams and initiatives. The Trust awards grants in support of nurse-led projects, using funds to empower nurses and make significant improvements to the patient care environment.

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, many healthcare services have struggled from the ongoing pressures that the worldwide pandemic has created.  Sexual health and wellbeing for young people is amongst the services that have been particularly affected. This award will help fund innovative and important research into how digital technologies can be developed to enhance young people’s sexual health and wellbeing.

Dr Clare Bennett said, ‘We hope that this research will address some of the inequalities that young people currently face in accessing sexual health services and enhancing their sexual health and wellbeing. This has become especially important since the COVID-19 Pandemic when digital support for health service provision has emerged as invaluable’.

In partnership with the Wales Centre for Evidence Based Care and colleagues in the NHS, Public Health Wales and the School of Social Sciences, the project will research young peoples’ perceptions of how digital sexual health services could be developed to promote engagement among their peers.

The team plan to publish a systematic review and a series of papers outlining the study’s findings over the next twelve months. It is hoped that these findings will serve as a platform for a programme of research in the field.