bernadette_bartlam - Keele University

School of Medicine

Bernadette Bartlam

Bernadette Bartlam (RGN, RSCN, MA, TLHE Cert, PhD) is Lecturer in Social Gerontology in the School of Medicine. Following her training as a Registered General Nurse and then a Registered Sick Children's Nurse, in 1993 Bernadette came to Keele to carry out her Masters research, exploring the longitudinal psychosocial impact in later life of involuntary childlessness. Following time spent practicing as a counsellor attached to a licensed reproductive medicine unit, she was awarded an NHS New Blood Research Fellowship and returned to Keele in 1997 to undertake her doctorate, which examined the position of counselling in reproductive medicine, in particular the relationship between research, ethics and practice.


At the end of her NBR Fellowship she was appointed research fellow to a three year longitudinal study at Keele, working with Mim Bernard, Simon Biggs and Julius Sim, exploring the effects of living in a retirement community on health, wellbeing and identity. In September, 2005 she was appointed to her current position within Medicine where she is director of the MMedSci in Geriatric Medicine. With Tom Scharf she has recently completed a study, commissioned by the Commission for Rural Communities, exploring social exclusion and older people in rural environments. With Tom Scharf, Mim Bernard, Julius Sim, Chris Phillipson, Andrew Dunning and Jenny Hislop she has also recently completed a study exploring pensioner poverty, funded by Help the Aged, now AgeUK. Together with Peter Crome and Frank Lally, Bernadette is leading on the qualitative arm of the PREDICT study, looking at the views of older people and carers on their inclusion/exclusion from clinical trials.  The study was funded by the EU under Seventh Framework Programme. She is currently also Principle Investigator on a four year project working with Mim Bernard, Tom Scharf, Julius Sim, Jenny Hislop and Allison Smith to examine the implications of living in a purpose built, mixed tenure, retirement community.  The project has been funded by Anchor Trust.  With Mo Ray, Bernadette is also leading on the development and implementation of a user-engagement strategy for the Centre for Social Gerontology, and to-date has received two waves of funding to support this through the iK innovation funding stream.


Bernadette has been a member of the University Research Ethics Committee and the research committees of the (then) School of Social Relations at Keele and the University Hospital of North Staffordshire Fertility Centre. She was a founding member of the Ethics Review Panels in the university and is currently serving on the School of Medicine REC. In 1999-2000 her interest in evidence-based practice led her to be a member of the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists Guideline Development Group on the management of infertility in tertiary care. She has also been a member of the National Committee of the British Infertility Counselling Association as well as a Trustee of Bereavement Care (now the Dove Service) in Stoke-on-Trent. From 1999-2001 she served on the meetings sub-group of the National Executive Committee of the British Fertility Society and has also been a member of the Executive Committee of the British Society of Gerontology.  She is currently a member of the research sub-committee at the Dove Service.
Her interests focus on later life from a lifecourse perspective and particularly social exclusion and poverty; new models of housing and social care; the social construction of ageing from the perspectives of quality of life, identity, gender and sexual orientation; existentialism, particularly in the context of involuntary childlessness, its meanings and effects; and death and dying. She also has a strong interest in the relationship between notions of ethics and how they relate to the practice by health care professionals; in the implications of this relationship for personal and professional identity and wellbeing. A further focus of work is interdisciplinarity from the perspective both of research methods, in particular mixed-methods, and teaching and learning.