Prof Austyn Snowden

Biography	I am chair in mental health at Edinburgh Napier University. I have held various senior roles within the school including head of mental health theme and head of nursing. I am currently head of enterprise and innovation, which is about making connections, often between disparate things. I am interested in how we learn, and how we don't, so we can spend more of our time facilitating the former.
Research Interests	I have led two RCTs and a five year evaluation of community based interventions in cancer care, all funded by Macmillan Cancer Support. I am currently co-leading a 36 site project designed to roll out these interventions as widely as possible. I have also led international studies into healthcare chaplaincy, and developed the first Patient Reported Outcome Measure validated to measure the impact of chaplain interventions. I am visiting professor and lead researcher in the European Research Institute for Chaplains in Healthcare (ERICH), and am currently advising the Scottish Government on how to optimise routinely collected data to better to understand and evaluate spiritual care at national level. More widely, I am editor of two journals, Nurse Education in Practice and Journal of Health and Social Care Chaplaincy. I have written over 100 peer reviewed journal articles, a dozen funded reports and three books. My favourite thing (at work) is supporting novice researchers to publish their first article. That was a turning point for me, the point at which I realised I not only had something to say, but that others might be interested too. I don't think I've shut up since.
Teaching and Learning	Currently evaluating our new shortened MSC online programmes in nursing and midwifery. They were designed to be 'light touch', facilitative, student led programmes with lecturers acting not as 'information givers' but rather as navigators and feedback givers, in line with learning theory of Stanislas Dehaene. Has it worked? That's the evaluation.
Scopus Author ID	24169800000