Professor Joanne Brooke

Joanne Brooke

Director of C-SCHaRR

Email:
joanne.brooke@bcu.ac.uk

Professor Joanne Brooke is an Adult Nurse and Chartered Health Psychologist. Joanne has a worked across clinical specialities as a nurse including surgery, orthopaedics, emergency care, neurology and stroke in both the NHS and private healthcare settings. The accumulation of clinical posts included that of Nurse Consultant in Dementia Care for a community NHS Foundation Trust. Joanne’s interest in research followed her completion of studies from undergraduate to doctoral level in Health Psychology. During this time, Joanne worked as a research nurse on randomised control trials investigating new treatments for psoriatic arthritis and influenza, and coordinated a population-based disease register in stroke.

Since entering academia, Joanne has developed Level 6 and 7 modules on hyper-acute stroke care and management, and dementia care, alongside a prison specific dementia workshop for prison staff, healthcare professionals, prisoners and all those who enter the prison setting.

Joanne’s research career commenced with the exploration of the understanding of evidence-based practice by student nurses, and the process of mentors supporting student nurses in both community and acute hospital placements to deliver evidence-based care. Engagement of nurses with evidence-based practice and research remains a key objective for Joanne.

The International and Dementia Collaborative (IDCC) evolved from an explorative study of the cultural beliefs of student nurses regarding dementia, as Director Joanne created this collaborative and led the international study with student nurses participating from England, Slovenia, Philippines and New Zealand. This study has led to the exploration of the beliefs of witchcraft as an explanation of dementia of student nurses originally from sub-Saharan Africa studying in England and those who are studying in Tanzania.

Joanne has a wide range of experience applying qualitative methods including interpretative phenomenological research, and across a variety of settings, including acute, community and prison healthcare settings, with the inclusion of both patients, family members, healthcare professionals, student nurses, prison staff and prisoners. An important element of Joanne’s work is the inclusion of seldom heard from groups whose health disparity and inequity remains a concern. An element of this work is involving those with dementia to be involved in research, as Joanne fully supports the Dementia Alliance International statement: ‘nothing about us without us’.

Joanne has lead research studies within the clinical fields of dementia and delirium exploring the impact of environments, knowledge, and lived experiences by people with dementia and/or delirium, family members and healthcare professionals.

An important element of Joanne’s work is the exploration of dementia within the prison setting, due to the aging prison population and poor health of prisoners the prevalence of dementia in prison is increasing. However, little work has explored the impact on the prisoner with dementia, fellow prisoners, prison staff and the prison regime. This is an exciting and on-going element of Joanne’s research.

On commencing at BCU Joanne is now a Professor of Nursing and Director of the Centre of Social Care, Health, and Related Research. Joanne has a clear vision to support the Centre to grow internally and externally. Internally will involve the support of staff across all departments to become involved in research, and externally to work with healthcare providers and prison services both locally in Birmingham and internationally in New Zealand, Australia, Philippines and Slovenia.

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