Connections and Opportunities: Reflections on impact during a PhD

DR FRANCESCA H. DAKIN Qualitative and Digital Health Researcher, University of Oxford

During my NIHR SPCR-funded doctoral research, I found that the concept of ‘impact’ can feel nebulous and intimidating. Particularly when in the thick of designing your project, gaining approvals, collecting data, refining methodology, conducting analysis or drafting a thesis, ‘impact’ can seem far away and hard to achieve. It certainly did for me, at least. Over time, I began to see impact not as a single event or output, but as a series of connections, contributions, and conversations.

My doctoral project, an ethnographic study of the digitalisation of UK general practice, examined how technologies were reshaping patient access, staff workload, and care delivery in a rapidly changing and highly complex system. Throughout, I sought out the traditional mechanisms for impact: papers, presentations, and policy and practice recommendations. Whilst these are all valuable and certainly enable impact, along the way, I discovered that creating impact is also about embedding yourself in relevant networks, being open to new roles, and translating insights into formats that resonate across academia, practice, and policy. In this blog post I’ll outline what pathways to impact I identified during my DPhil, and which I engaged with.

Academic Impact: Collaborate, take initiative, and start writing early

Linking my doctoral work to larger studies like Remote by Default 2 and ModCons Goes Dutch allowed me to explore thematic and methodological overlaps, gain more experience in team research settings, and learn from more senior colleagues. These collaborations strengthened my research and communication skills, created opportunities for co-authorship, and opened the door to more conference presentations. Across my DPhil, I worked on three additional research projects, each of which helped me to understand and refine my empirical and methodological interests, grow my research network, and find new opportunities.

If you’re a doctoral student, look for projects aligned with your topic or methodology. Network with other researchers in your area of interest: offer your expertise, join analysis teams, and volunteer to lead discrete workstreams. Collaborating around academic impact affords PhD students a chance to learn from more experienced researchers in a collegial environment, expand networks, and create new opportunities for impact and future research.

When it came to writing academic outputs, I found it useful to start writing early. This helps to clarify ideas and build momentum. The paper I am most proud of from my DPhil (this one on digital candidacy and the digital facsimile) took around two and a half years to come to fruition from initial idea to final publication. It can be helpful to look for special issues in your field/topic area to help generate ideas – that was how I found the motivation to write the first article from my PhD (this one on the unique translational work on support staff). Test and refine your ideas with conference presentations – ask your colleagues about the best fit for your empirical setting, methodological approach, or theoretical framing. Engaged conference audiences can offer important feedback on where to direct your attention, which is especially important when one is deep in analysis or writing, and on how relevant your work is to practice and policy. I found presenting my recent paper on technostress to a mixed academic and practice audience helped me to see the practical utility of my findings and ideas for translating them into impact.

Practice Impact: Listen, share, and listen again!

During fieldwork, I used direct feedback to share emerging findings with staff in my GP practice sites. I spoke and presented my work formally in dedicated sessions and focus groups, during practice meetings and training sessions, had informal conversations with staff, and created a bulletin lay results summary halfway through the project for participating practices. These exchanges didn’t just seek to validate the relevance of my research, but to identify areas for improvement, make changes, and understand the best ways to continue communication. 

The main practice-focused outputs from my PhD followed the preferences of the practices themselves: practice-based presentations, contributions to training programmes, and visual findings summaries. These kinds of rapid or visual evidence summaries can help to make research more accessible and recommendations easier to implement. For two of my papers, I worked with a design company that specialised in translating scientific research into digestible summaries, which are available to download here. The opportunity to do so came through my collaboration with the RBD2 project.

Sometimes, practice impact can be hard to trace, so it’s important to document these processes as you go to help to (re)construct your impact narrative.

Figure 1: Two-page summary of access inequalities paper for practice and policy

Policy Impact: Be in the room

Policy impact sometimes begins with showing up. In order to show up, you need to know where to go and who can get you there. Once again, it helps to have built a network of more experienced researchers or to have developed project connections to do this. Policy impact is difficult for PhD students to achieve in isolation, and so you may benefit from identifying a policy-focused mentor.

In my case, policy influence involved partnering with The Nuffield Trust to help me understand how policy worked and where influence could happen. I shared my findings in workshops run by Nuffield in collaboration with the RBD2 project, with stakeholders from across practice and policy networks. We visited parliament to host a feedback event for the study, for which I created two-page policy briefings of a paper and engaged in discussions around wider findings with attendees. The visual summaries created for practice also had dual utility for policy personnel, including a section on policy recommendations.

Other ways to seek direct policy impact are to respond to relevant Calls for Evidence from the government, apply for schemes like the POST Fellowships to develop your own policy network, or engage with the development of NICE Guidance as a stakeholder or committee member. Sometimes influence involves just being in the room, and engaging in informal discussions at opportune moments.

Policy engagement isn’t only about formal submissions. It can be about building relationships, understanding the language and timelines of policymakers, and presenting your findings in formats they can quickly absorb; executive summaries, infographics, or a two-slide deck can often be more impactful than a 6,000-word paper.

Figure 2: Two-page summary of technostress paper for practice and policy

Final Thoughts: Defining impact in doctoral research

My biggest takeaway? Impact is iterative and relational. It often looks less like a single headline moment and more like a series of embedded contributions – some visible, some behind the scenes – which slowly shape the discourse, practice, or policy space you’re working in.

If you’re a PhD student wondering how to create impact, start small: share an idea, connect to a project, volunteer for a talk. These efforts can build towards something greater than the sum of their parts.