The current opportunity is available for current Manchester Met students, to apply you must be based in the UK for the duration of the role.
Project Background:
Numerical reasoning is common in healthcare: understanding nutrition information, interpreting blood-sugar readings, medication dosage, and gauging probability of risk. Average numeracy skills in the UK and USA are poor, even among highly educated individuals, and they are associated with worse health outcomes. For example, poor numeracy skills are associated with higher BMI, poorer management of diabetes and asthma, reduced medication compliance, and more. Furthermore, poor numeracy skills impair risk communication and as such influence health risk estimation, which can lead to poor decisions such as vaccination uptake. It is therefore important that clinicians are able to examine their patients numerical skills, in order to adjust communication. However, to-date, there has not been a review that examines the availability and quality of numeracy assessments within healthcare.
The current project:
The student working on this project will work as part of a team (based in MMU and UCL), to conduct the systematic review. The search term have already been selected, but the student will assist in running the searches, screening the articles, and if time allows, extracting information from selected articles. Articles will be those that describe/evaluate/explore the design and/or evaluation of adults (>18 years old) numeracy assessment when used in the care of adults with any diagnosis and any health setting. This also includes numeracy assessments for staff working in healthcare. It is expected that the project will result in a high profile publication, in which the student will be a co-author.
Details
Dates: 25 May 2026 - 17 July 2026
Hours per week: 10
Students will be expected to develop the following skills and experiences while carrying out this internship:
Technical skills and experience:
- Developing search strategies: learning how to use databases, keywords, Boolean logic, and inclusion/exclusion criteria.
- Critical appraisal: evaluating the quality, bias, and reliability of studies.
- Data extraction: identifying relevant variables, outcomes, and methodological details across diverse studies.
- Synthesis of evidence: combining findings into a coherent narrative or quantitative summary.
Team working skills and experience:
- Consensus‑building: earning to justify inclusion/exclusion decisions and resolve disagreements constructively.
- Inter‑rater reliability awareness — understanding how different team members interpret criteria and how to standardise decisions.
- Higher‑quality critical appraisal — discussing study-details with others to improve depth and accuracy.
- Collaborative cross‑checking each other’s work to reduce errors and improve attention to detail.
Personal skills:
Clear communication: explaining reasoning, listening actively, and expressing uncertainty without hesitation.
Constructive disagreement: learning to challenge ideas respectfully and resolve differences using evidence rather than opinion.
Empathy and perspective‑taking: understanding how others interpret the same study or criteria differently.
Confidence in academic dialogue: becoming comfortable contributing to technical conversations.
Self pacing and self-motivated work: you will get experience in working independently, while being part of a team.
Please Note - As part of the 2026 Student Internship offering, priority will be given to Level 5 & 6 students who have specified in the Careers Registration survey (this is completed during enrolment and cannot be changed at this time) that they have had no work experience in the last 12 months and would like some on campus work or a short work placement. However, applications are welcomed from all students meeting the criteria below.
Students are only eligible to undertake one internship under the 2026 Student Internship offering.