Can you help researcher? (From Leigh Journal)

Can you help researcher?

9:00am Tuesday 27th December 2011 in Letters

A NEW research study needs help from people in the North-West to understand what it’s like to experience and live with an acquired facial disfigurement.

The disabilities movement has made significant progress over the last thirty years. However, the issue of facial disfigurement has been largely ignored until relatively recently. Prior research has indicated that people who experience an acquired facial disfigurement can have a lower quality of life, partly owing to the ignorance and negative social comments of others.

My PhD research at the University of Liverpool seeks to explore how people with an acquired facial disfigurement experience the event itself and how this may impact on their lives afterwards. The aim is to let people speak for themselves in their own words. I am hoping to use the results to inform society and reduce ignorance in this area.

I am looking to recruit people to help with the study and would like to invite your readers to contact me if they might be interested in taking part. I am looking for people with an acquired facial disfigurement (over the age of 18) who would be willing to take part in an interview about their experiences before, during and after the event. This may have been gained for example, through being in a car crash, an accident or through having medical treatment, which has lead to a different appearance. I would like to talk with people who find this ok as well as those who are struggling and somewhere in-between.

Please contact Anne-Marie Martindale on 0151 794 5595/0772 251 4499 or email: ammartin@liv.ac.uk Anne-Marie Martindale Research Associate and PhD student University of Liverpool