Meet the Expert: Dr Paul Watson
Welcome to 'Meet the Expert', our series bringing you informative interviews with Armed Forces researchers, policy makers and service providers. Read on to learn about current work, aspirations for progress and future work, and insights into expert perspectives on key issues impacting ex-Service personnel and their families.
In this issue, we interviewed Dr Paul Watson, Assistant Director of the Northern Hub for Veterans and Military Families Research and Assistant Professor in Nursing at Northumbria University. Paul's research focuses on the emotional health and wellbeing of military connected children and young people, posttraumatic stress disorder, social isolation and loneliness in the veteran population, and military connected suicide, and he is an expert in narrative methodologies.
1. Please tell us about your background and how you came to be involved in work relating to the Armed Forces Community?
My mum married into the Army when I was three years old, so I grew up in the military community. My first experience as a military child was when we moved to Germany, where we spent four years, then onto Essex for three years, then finally on to London. I think in that whole period I had lived in five houses and been to four different schools. When I was 17, I was a bit lost, I had no qualifications but loved sport, so I joined the Army and served with the Royal Logistic Corps for six years, where I did a lot of sport. During my Service, I undertook operations in Bosnia and Kosovo.
When I left the Army in 2003, I worked for the Metropolitan Police. Then, in 2005, I moved to Northumberland, where I worked for Northumbria Police as a community support officer. This role really gave me insight into children and young people’s poor emotional health and how this can lead to low-level crime, antisocial behaviour, and substance misuse. Importantly, this role lit a fire within me to understand more about children and young people’s emotional and mental health.
In 2009, I undertook an access course due to my lack of qualifications, and in 2010, I attended Northumbria University to begin training as a mental health nurse. In my final year of the course, I met a couple of school nurses, and during these conversations and with my ethos of prevention rather than cure, I applied to go straight onto a Masters to complete the Specialist Community Public Health (SCPHN) Course – it was this course where I found a love for Public Health and innovation for practice under the Public Health framework of promote, protect and prevent – something I still use to this day. Whilst still a student school nurse, I met with the national lead for public health, and due to my persistence, I was fortunate to have instigated the health visitor and school nurse pathway for military children. When I completed this course in 2014, I gained employment with Harrogate Foundation NHS Trust and became the School Nurse for Catterick Garrison. It was here where I really honed my theoretical and practical knowledge and championed for military connected children and young people to have a voice within health. As a result, in the lead-up to Remembrance in 2015, I was asked by SNP Martin Docherty to provide a report for Parliament for his adjournment to champion the need for more research and service provisions for military connected children and young people.
It was this work which led me to academia. I met Professor Matt Kiernan Director of the Northern Hub for Veterans and Families Research at Northumbria University in early 2016, and he worked on a PhD studentship for me to complete. This studentship was to understand the lived experience of young carers within the military, which I completed in 2022. In 2018, I was fortunate to secure a lecturer post at Northumbria within the mental health team and the SCPHN team, where I would teach undergraduate and postgraduate nursing students, later moving to the children’s nursing team. During the years, I have worked under the direction of Professor Kiernan, and I have worked on various projects, including the recent OiTM veteran suicide project. I have also been the Principal Investigator (PI) to my own projects, including A critical investigation of the impact of an ex-Service personnel parent with PTSD and developing an intervention to reduce social isolation and loneliness in ex-Service personnel with PTSD. As you can see, there is a theme within my work stream which is underpinned by public health theory and practice to promote, prevent and protect poor outcomes for ex-Service personnel, their families and military connected children and young people within our local communities, which I have written about in this blog for Forces Children Scotland.
In addition to the above, I am a Trustee for The Bastion Baton, a small military charity based in the South of England and the School and Public Health Nurses Association (SAPHNA), the national body for school nurses. I have also provided consultancy for colleagues in the USA, namely the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, to support the development of Hidden Helpers and to Dr Roxana Dalgado from Caring for the Caregiver (University of Texas – San Antonio).
2. What research projects are you currently working on and how do they fit into the bigger picture of understanding and supporting the Armed Forces Community?
I am about to embark on two projects that I hope will provide a foundation for developing future research and service provision specifically for military connected children and young people.
The first project funded by the Armed Forces Covenant Found Trust and in collaboration with Dr Rachael Gribble (KCMHR), Professor Gerri Matthews-Smith (Centre for Military Research – Edinburgh Napier), Dr Mary Keeling (RAND Europe), Mrs Rebecca Steel (University Central Lancaster), Miss Siobhan Cambridge and Professor Matt Fossey (VFiMR, Anglia Ruskin University) will look to broaden the understanding of the Social Determinants of Health of Military Connected children and young people from their perspective. The social determinants of health are defined by the World Health Organisation as the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life.
This project titled ‘Military Children’ - Promote, Protect and Prevent’ will see the creation of a bespoke tool designed to capture detailed information about the experiences of military connected children and young people, to understand how these experiences shape the conditions in which military connected children and young people grow. The tool will have three variations, suited to different age groups, and will aim to gather information directly from children and young people on their own experiences of numerous social determinants of health. These include economic stability, educational attainment, access to healthcare, neighbourhood and environment, safety in their communities, housing and living conditions. We hope this project will provide the foundational benchmark to strategically inform policy, practice, and interventions throughout the sector.
The second international project funded by the Forces Children’s Trust in partnership with Miss Siohban Cambridge (VFiMR Anglia Ruskin University) and Dr Roxana Delgado (Caring for the Caregivers, University of Texas – San Antonio) will seek to understand the relationships among Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) and Benevolent Childhood Experiences (BCEs) of Military Connected Children and Young People from their perspective. For many years, studies relating to children and young people from the military community have strongly emphasized the negative experiences rather than the positive experiences. Up to date, few studies have explored the effects of co-occurrences of ACES, PCEs and BCEs. For this reason, the relationship between negative life experiences and negative outcomes is well documented. This study hopes to provide a balanced approach to understanding the ‘real time’ lived experience of military connected children and young people using both the ACE screening tool, alongside the BCE’s and PCE’s screening tool.
3. What other research or policy areas relating to the Armed Forces Community are you especially passionate about or feel need further attention? Please expand on this and tell us about them, as much as you can.
Whilst it is important to understand the count or numerical statistics of military connected children and young people, I feel it is as important to gain the narratives of this population to clearly understand what is important to them in real time. Current research or policy on military connected children and young people is either retrospective i.e. from an adult child or from a parent, carer, or service provider. I am passionate about the rights of military connected children and young people to have a voice in what matters to them and what happens to and with them. The Selous (Living in our Shoes, June 2020) made 110 recommendations to Government, Charities and organisations, of which 48 specifically referenced children and young people (CYP). Subsequently, the sets out plans on how to ensure that these recommendations are taken forward. This is something we can facilitate and address within the military connected children and young people’s community through co-production.
4. What are your future aspirations for the impact and utilization of your work/research?
I am very fortunate to have been awarded the funding to carry out the aforementioned projects, which I hope will provide agency for military connected children and young people to have their voices heard. I hope these voices provide the data we desperately need to shape future policy and practice within this space. Importantly, I hope the findings of both projects enable us to promote good practice, prevent poor outcomes for military connected children and young people and protect their long-term overall health and well-being through preventative methods.
5. What do you think are the key challenges impacting current ex-Service personnel and their families, and how do you think research and/or policy can be best used to address them?
I feel the biggest challenge for ex-Service personnel and their families is a lack of knowledge regarding the lives of their children. I am concerned there is a distinct lack of research or policy that meets the specific needs of military connected children and young people. I would like to see how military connected children and young people see their lives within Service, as a reserve or merchant navy family and within an ex-Service personnel family so we truly understand the lived experience and can make appropriate provisions available. That said, I would also like there to be more research relating to transition, be that moving home, schools, communities and leaving the forces – from the perspective of the child. A deep dive into this will enable us to put appropriate policy and service provision in place to prevent poor outcomes.
6. What do you think will be the leading challenges for the next generation of ex-Service personnel and how do you think research and/or policy can be best used to address them?
I think the leading challenge for the next generation of ex-Service personnel and their families will be the reduction of inequalities, especially for military connected children and young people. Year after year there is a significant increase in poor emotional and mental health among the children and young people’s population. That said, most military connected children and young people thrive within their communities and use the experiences they have gained to excel. However, like all children and young people, military connected children and young people experience episodes of poor emotional health and wellbeing and are therefore no different. However, the context of their lives and the experiences they face cause or at least have some correlation to their presenting emotional health. This is in part due to several reasons, including separation from family members, and friends, frequent home moves, changing landscapes in their education journey and their communities, and being an emotionally developing child or young person.
Moreover, children and young people from the military community have lived through some of the fiercest military conflicts and, as a byproduct of war, have witnessed parents, other family members and friends suffer with combat’s emotional, mental, and physical effects, as well as the death of a loved one. It is this exposure to the environmental presentations and the ripple effects of military combat that, for many children and young people, have become routed within their communities, and therefore require identification and positive intervention to prevent poor emotional health from turning into long-term mental health issues or long term non-communicable disease.
Understanding the emotional health and wellbeing needs of military connected children and young people is paramount to enabling them to thrive in a society where they may be perceived as different and therefore require a dedicated strategy to acknowledge, understand and meet the unique needs of this population.
7. Can you tell us about the methods you tend to use in your research, and why you gravitate towards these kinds of approaches?
As you may have gathered from my previous and current research projects, I have dedicated my research methods to hearing the voices of the population with whom I am working. I am committed to not only hearing the voices of children and young people but also inquiring into the meaning of what they are saying. Inquiry-based methods provide rich narrated data to enable the research to come alive. Within my PhD, I used Narrative Inquiry, where people are viewed as embodiments of their lived story in the context of their environment, as a method to understand the meanings behind what the emotional response was for young carers who cared for a parent who previously Served and is living with PTSD. Through this method, I could sequentially map moments in time and identify cause, effect, and behavioural outcomes in the context of their environment.
I also advocate the use of co-production as a methodological approach to research. In practice, the potential to empower vulnerable individuals and disadvantaged communities and improve access to appropriate support is at the heart of co-production, particularly in the context of addressing the needs of seldom heard populations. As a research method, co-production can produce meaningful knowledge depending on the context in which it is applied. Both narrative inquiry and co-production methods were used in the OiTM Veteran suicide project, allowing us to form a life grid of events and map the journey to suicide, which resulted in the co-creation of a toolkit for service development in the hope of reducing ex-Service personnel suicide.
8. Given unlimited funding and time, what would be your dream piece of research to undertake involving the Armed Forces community?
As a military child, someone who has served in the Armed Forces, and someone who is passionate about service provision and research relating to the public health of military connected children and young people, I have found my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I am very fortunate to have been awarded both the aforementioned projects and can’t wait to start.
Many thanks to Dr Paul Watson for sharing his insights.
Catch us next month for another interesting and informative interview with an expert from the Armed Forces Community.