Dr Elen Williams has been a General Practitioner working within the borough of Tower Hamlets for the past seven years. She is currently the co-lead of a City St George’s, University of London project, working within the Bromley-By-Bow community to provide better healthcare access to people with severe mental illness. She was recently awarded a Barts Charity Healthcare Professional Clinical Research Training Fellowship for 2023/24.
During her fellowship, Elen will be exploring long-term pain in people with a severe mental illness. Research has shown that people with a severe mental illness die 15-20 years earlier than average, in particular due to heart attacks and strokes. These health issues are more commonly found in people who have long-term pain. Her research will focus on the Tower Hamlets community, which has the worst early death rate for people with an SMI in London, and the second worst in the UK.
Why did you apply for a Barts Charity Fellowship?
“I’ve always wanted to do a PhD, but Fellowship schemes often have a national focus. I love that the Barts Charity Fellowship is specifically for the local area within Barts Health NHS Trust and that’s what really appealed to me. As a GP working in Tower Hamlets, the research I want to do is what benefits people in the local area.
We know that Tower Hamlets is one of the worst affected areas for severe mental illness and long-term pain. One third of residents are Bengali, and this population is disproportionately affected by long-term pain.”
"It means a lot to me to be able to help the local community. I’ve been a doctor for 17 years and a GP for seven years in East London so I’ve got questions that I’ve not been able to answer. Doing this research will give me a way to really improve the lives of local people, and no other scheme could allow me to directly answer the questions I have.”
What is your main goal in this project and what will the research consist of?
“The key aim of this research is to establish a treatment for long-term pain in SMI patients within Tower Hamlets. I will be doing this in three components. The first will be to complete a scoping review of different guidelines and evidence in treating pain in patients with a severe mental illness. The second part will involve examining a large database, to see whether patients with a severe mental illness are receiving those specified treatments.
Finally, I will be working closely with patients and carers to find out about their experiences of treating pain or living with chronic pain, as well as clinicians and other professionals such as psychologists, acupuncturists and pharmacists. Using these three studies, I will continue working with the local community to establish a pain treatment that is suitable for patients.”
What changes would you like to see happen longer term?
At the moment up to 75% of trials exclude those who have a mental health condition, so that’s something I’d like to see change in the future. I’d love for others to see my research and feel more confident in including people with an SMI, especially in the pain research community. I’m hoping that patients being involved in the pain intervention process will make it directly relevant to them and make a difference in their lives.
What does this fellowship mean to you?
“It means so much to me – it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I want to move my career into this field of research. It’s such an honour to be given this fellowship, in an area of research that really doesn’t exist at the moment on a primary care level.”
Our Clinical Research Training Fellowship offers three years of funding for healthcare professionals to undertake PhD training in health-related research.