Amy Chidley
Research Trainee

Profile

Biography

BMus(Hons) (Birmingham), DipABRSM, LRSM, CTABRSM

My professional background is as performer and teacher of music with related interests in Music Therapy and Musicians' Health with an undergraduate thesis on the relationship between music and the body. I live with a multisystemic disability which has impacted my life and career for over 30 years but led to extensive involvement across health and social care services and research as a Lived Experience practitioner, consultant and ‘Boundary Spanner.' From early on I encountered the acute need for more effective inter-organisational strategy to combat siloed-working, duplicity, personnel and financial waste and delayed progress. My work is dedicated to accelerating the effectiveness of Lived Experience Boundary Spanners.

I am in my early stages as a career researcher progressing from many years of public research involvement and engagement.

• July 2025: awarded a place on the NIHR Mental Health & Social Care-Incubator Stepping into Research (STiR) Programme.
• June 2026: awarded a NIHR Pre-Application Support Fund Career Development Award to provide time and funding to support a Predoctoral Award application. 
• Sept 2026-Aug 2027: The University of York School for Business and Society Mental Health and Social Care Research Centre is my host institution (and beyond, pending a successful Predoctoral Award application).
• I am a member of the NIHR Academy, the NIHR Academy for Public Members and the York-based, national Lived Experience Network for Scholars.

Research

Overview

Research interests:

• Lived Experience Boundary Spanning
• Mixed Methods
• Social Network Analysis
• Autoethnography 

• I have extensive PPIE experience in health and social care research across a wide diversity of projects and institutions. Co-investigator roles include:
  -Coproducing solutions to perinatal loneliness with Dr. Ruth-Naughton Doe (University of York) and
  -Realist economic approaches to the prevention of perinatal mental illness through the VCFSE sector with Dr. Annette Bauer et. al (London School of Economics).
• My personal research aspirations explore optimising lived experience in Boundary Spanning, due to sector (and society)-wide lack of cohesion in tackling health and social care and wider societal issues. Health and social care policies increasingly acknowledge the crucial need for greater public, patient and carer involvement throughout all aspects of service design and delivery, including research, for patient and carer benefit. The extent and effectiveness of this varies hugely across the landscape. Lived experience personnel not only bring insight from patients, carers and the wider public as well as a wide diversity of personal and professional expertise, but are also often strategically placed to span boundaries of many organisations and able to act as catalysts for connection and more effective innovation. However, infrastructure is lacking to provide strategic, financial, supervisory and wellbeing support.
• I seek to address the evidence gap for the benefits and barriers associated with these crucial roles. I will utilise qualitative data gathered from organisations and lived experience boundary spanners alongside quantitative data through harnessing Social Network Analysis methodology. This mixed methods approach may help to accelerate the perceived validity of research surrounding lived experience-centric research due to the inherent experiential and necessarily qualitative nature of the practice historically facing epistemic injustice, thus being deemed less reliable than clinical-centric and quantitative research. I am also exploring autoethnography as a vehicle to capture the inextricable nature of lived / living experience personal versus professional existence as lived by myself and my research participants. This work also addresses health inequalities by striving to widen accessibility from not only the most able, most resilient and most financially independent but also to the fully representative lived experience community.

Teaching

Other teaching

• I am a PPIE consultant and mentor for health and social care Career Development Award Holder researchers.

Publications

Full publications list

View in ORCID