Professor Kinta Beaver

Kinta has an established track record of research that focuses on cancer survivorship and how we address the needs of people who have completed their treatment but may continue to suffer long term physical and psychological effects from their diagnosis and treatment regimes.

This work has international relevance and Kinta has been the Chief Investigator and primary grant holder on a number of clinical trials that have evaluated alternatives to the traditional approach of patients attending hospital outpatient departments on a regular basis after treatment has been completed. She worked closely with clinical colleagues to develop a specialist nurse-led telephone intervention and evaluated this intervention for patients with breast, colorectal and endometrial cancer.

Kinta developed a specialist nurse led telephone intervention that she evaluated for clinical and cost effectiveness in randomised controlled trials for patients with different types of cancer. She led the first trial in the world to report on endometrial cancer follow-up, comparing hospital and telephone follow-up for women diagnosed and treated for endometrial cancer (ENDCAT trial).

Additionally, she has carried out qualitative work alongside clinical trials to gain a deeper understanding of how and why an intervention may be effective. Over a long research career she has interviewed hundreds of patients with cancer to gain their personal perspectives so that these views can inform current and future studies. Patients were highly satisfied with being telephoned at home instead of attending hospital outpatient clinics and this work would now seem to have particular relevance given the shift away from face-to-face consultations during the covid pandemic.

Kinta specialises in applied health care research, focusing on meeting the psychosocial, information and support needs of patients in a real-world environment. Close working relationships between academic and clinical colleagues in Medicine, Nursing, Clinical Psychology and Allied Health have enabled research that is grounded in clinical reality A key feature of this research has been on fully utilising and developing the skills of clinical nurse specialists so that they can provide patients with the information and support they need at key points in the disease trajectory, working within the confines of available time and resources.