MRes/PGDip/PGCert Health and Social Care

Fees for entry in 2027 have not yet been set. For reference, the fees for the academic year beginning September 2026 were as follows:

• MRes (full-time distance learning)
  UK students (per annum): £12,600
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £27,300
• MRes (part-time distance learning)
  UK students (per annum): £6,300
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £13,650
• PGDip (full-time distance learning)
  UK students (per annum): £10,100
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £21,800
• PGDip (part-time distance learning)
  UK students (per annum): £5,050
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £10,900
• PGCert (part-time distance learning)
  UK students (per annum): £2,500
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £5,500

The fees quoted above are fully inclusive of tuition, administration and computational costs.

Fees for entry are subject to yearly review. The University reserves the right to increase your tuition fee by up to 7% each year for courses lasting more than one year, including to reflect rising costs associated with delivering our educational and wider student experience. Postgraduate fees information .

Always contact the admissions team if you are unsure which fee applies to your qualification award and method of attendance.

All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).

NIHR INSIGHT research master's degree studentships

Funded health and social care research master's studentships are available through the north-west regional programme of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) INSIGHT Inspiring Students into Research scheme.

For more information and details of how to apply, visit the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration North West Coast website .

NIHR Pre-doctoral Clinical and Practitioner Academic Fellowships

NIHR Pre-doctoral Clinical and Practitioner Academic Fellowships can offer successful candidates backfill and fees to undertake MClinRes units and to prepare a Doctoral Clinical Practitioner Academic Fellowship application. You need to apply directly to NIHR for one of these awards.

For the latest scholarship and bursary information please visit the fees and funding page.

This unit will emphasise the theory, concepts, and evidence-based good practice that under-pin managing a high-quality research project in a health or social care setting in accordance with good practice guidance, ethical and governance standards. In particular, we will focus on how to apply this knowledge to: designing effective recruitment, consenting, data/document management and service user/PPIE plans. Thereby, the unit should support you in effectively planning and managing a research study in contemporary and challenging health and social care contexts.

To critically appraise and synthesise relevant research-related evidence, and through evidence based decision-making apply such evidence to the planning and management of good quality research in health and social care.

The unit will be taught in one semester through distance learning. A range of interactive online materials are available on VLE's. These include: video clips, weekly reading, activities, and discussion boards with students and staff and links to web-based resources. Though the unit is primarily delivered on-line, students will be offered the option of two face-face seminar sessions (at the start and mid-way through the unit).

• Critically review different research paradigms and discuss how these apply to health and social care research.
• Value and critical appraise relevant research policy, statements, frameworks and legislation that underpin health and social care research.
• Value and critically examine the concepts underlying useful research and avoidance of research waste

• Synthesise and apply the requirements and good research practice statements to a range of health and social care contexts.
• Critically appraise the principles underlying ethical research and how these apply to ethical reviews of research.
• Value research participants’ perspectives, and critically analyse and synthesise evidence underpinning good practice in service user/carer/PPIE in health and social care research.

• Design effective recruitment strategies
• Propose robust plans for gaining informed consent and assent
• Design effective data and document management strategies.
• Develop plans for promoting and managing service user/carer/PPIE in health and social care research.

• Critically reflect on your own academic performance and utilise a range of strategies to improve these and overcome any particular difficulties.
• Demonstrate skills in working collegiately and communicating effectively with others as a member of a team.
• Effectively utilise information technology / health informatics.
• Utilise skills in systematic, critical analysis, synthesis and creative approaches to assist in problem-solving and decision-making in relation to complex issues.

Students will normally have the opportunity to receive feedback on formative work submitted prior to the summative assessment. Other feedback opportunities will also be available in class and online discussion boards. Online feedback is provided in Grademark. Provisional feedback based on internal marking will be made available prior to the Exam Board on the basis that these marks are yet to be ratified at the Exam Board and therefore may be subject to change. A standard feedback mechanism in Grademark is utilised across all postgraduate programmes within the School which provides detailed and constructive feedback on each component and aspect of assessment and identifies areas of strength and those aspects which could be enhanced.

Student feedback is obtained through open discussion forums on VLE's, in class discussions, via formal University unit evaluation forms and also qualitative, in house evaluations at the end of the unit. 

Byrne, D. (2016), Research ethics, Los Angeles, Sage.
NHS HRA (2020) Public involvement. Health Research Authority. https://www.hra.nhs.uk/planning-and-improving-research/best-practice/public-involvement/
Treweek, S., Pitkethly, M., Cook, J., Fraser, C., Mitchell, E., Sullivan, F., Jackson, C., Taskila, T. K., & Gardner, H. (2018). Strategies to improve recruitment to randomised trials. Cochrane Library (CD-ROM), 2018(2). https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.mr000013.pub6