Professor Patrick Doherty is Chair of Cardiovascular Health in the Department of Health Sciences and Director of the British Heart Foundation (BHF) National Audit of Cardiac Rehabilitation (NACR). Patrick was former president of the British Association for Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation (BACPR) and former Chair of the Cardiac Rehabilitation Section of the European Association of Preventive Cardiology (EAPC). He continues to be highly research active in the area of cardiovascular disease prevention and rehabilitation with over 100 peer reviewed journal papers in the last ten years, six co-authored European position papers alongside five British and European clinical guidelines.
In his senior academic leadership roles Professor Doherty is utilising his extensive experience in the assessment of research quality to inform Research Excellence Framework (REF) and department wide research grant submissions. In his role as Chair of the Research Committee and departmental lead for research (January 2014 to date) the department has substantially increased annual research income to over £9 million in 2018/19.
Patrick’s commitment to cardiovascular disease prevention and rehabilitation led to his appointment as NHS Clinical Lead for Cardiac Rehabilitation where he supported service innovation in the NHS and led the development of an evidence-based clinical pathway (Department of Health Cardiac Rehabilitation Commissioning Pack) which is presently being used in the UK. His research is influencing clinical practice through improvements in uptake and the quality of cardiovascular prevention and rehabilitation services. Patrick has developed a chair based exercise programme that formed an integral part of a successful NIHR funded programme grant (REACH-HF) published in 2018. Patrick is part of three separate five year NIHR programme grants investigating comprehensive rehab and exercise interventions for patients with (1) cardiovascular disease (2) cancer and (3) mental health conditions.
Patrick's research and academic supervision has supported 15 PhD students (10 international) to success with many continuing into post-doctoral collaborative research. He continues to supervise national and international research students in the area of cardiovascular health, physical activity improvement, exercise prescription and patient self-management interventions.
Patrick's research interests are in cardiac rehabilitation, cardiovascular disease prevention and exercise.
Patrick would welcome PhD projects on observational research using large databases. His group hosts the largest cardiovascular prevention and rehabilitation database in Europe and would welcome interest from PhD students who wish to become part of our established research team which has over twelve successful PhD completions. The aim of this project is to identify top performing rehab programmes delivered in routine practice and develop meaningful ways of presenting patient outcomes at local hospital level. Patrick would also be interested in supervising PhDs in the following areas: Cardiovascular disease prevention and rehabilitation; patient self-management approaches in chronic disease.
This research group supports a range of methods including RCTs, systematic reviews and observational research using large databases.
There is no direct funding for PhD students as part of this project but the team will commit time and expertise to support the candidate to completion of their PhD.
Present postgraduate researchers/students