While Rebecca Carnegie was training to be a GP, she realised that a career in general practice was not for her. What she really wanted to do was to specialise in psychiatry and to work in academic research. Today she has achieved that ambition and is an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow at the Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership Trust. The funding enables her to have a happy balance of clinical work, seeing patients with complex mental health problems, and research work.
Dr Carnegie attributes her success in attracting this prestigious funding to the skills and experience she gained during a six-month research project funded by the University of Bristol's Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research (EBI).
“I was lucky enough to be awarded one of EBI's Clinical Primers, which aim to give clinicians an opportunity to perform research,” said Dr Carnegie. “This gave me the same salary I would have had in a job in the NHS and gave me the time to gain experience in quantitative research. Without these six months, I don't think I would have been successful in my application for an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship.”
During her time at the University of Bristol's School of Social and Community Medicine, Carnegie investigated a possible link between cortisol levels in saliva and the later onset of depression. She used data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALPSAC/Children of the 90s) and gained valuable experience in statistical analysis including the use of statistical software packages that are crucial for undertaking this kind of research.
“Previous research had suggested that elevated salivary cortisol increases the short-term risk of subsequent depressive illness, but our work did not find any evidence of such a link,” said Dr Carnegie. “While this was a negative result, it is an important negative as this study used data from a much larger group of people than previous studies.”
As well as her clinical work, Dr Carnegie is currently writing a Cochrane Review of Treatment-Resistant Depression and is also exploring a few options for developing into a PhD proposal.