Navi­da Bachan, a grad­u­ate stu­dent at UWI, has been award­ed a pres­ti­gious Rout­ledge/Round Ta­ble Com­mon­wealth Stu­dentship award for the aca­d­e­m­ic year 2020-2021. On­ly two such awards are made an­nu­al­ly; Navi­da has won the award open to any PhD stu­dent reg­is­tered at a mem­ber uni­ver­si­ty of the ACU out­side the UK.

The win­ner of the 2020-21 award for a PhD stu­dent reg­is­tered at a uni­ver­si­ty in the UK is Rob Cul­lum.

Bachan is study­ing for a PhD in Gov­er­nance at the Sir Arthur Lewis In­sti­tute of So­cial and Eco­nom­ic Stud­ies, Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine. She holds a BSc in Eco­nom­ics and an MSc in De­vel­op­ment Sta­tis­tics with a spe­cial­i­sa­tion in So­cial and De­mo­graph­ic Sta­tis­tics, both from UWI.

In 2017 she was the re­cip­i­ent of the Jack Hare­wood award for the most out­stand­ing stu­dent on the MSc in De­vel­op­ment Sta­tis­tics pro­gramme. Bachan spent a se­mes­ter at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Al­ber­ta as a vis­it­ing grad­u­ate stu­dent, ex­pand­ing her knowl­edge of mixed-meth­ods re­search for her PhD whilst en­hanc­ing her skills through In­ter­na­tion­al House's Glob­al Lead­er­ship De­vel­op­ment pro­gramme.

Her PhD re­search in­ves­ti­gates health sys­tem gov­er­nance and its im­pact on the per­for­mance of health sys­tems with­in the con­text of T&T, and in re­la­tion to the Unit­ed King­dom. Bachan has a spe­cial in­ter­est in the tenets of par­tic­i­pa­to­ry gov­er­nance in the health sec­tor, and how it has been ap­plied in Com­mon­wealth con­texts that have fa­cil­i­tat­ed im­proved health out­comes for pop­u­la­tions.

Bachan will be us­ing the Rout­ledge/Round Ta­ble Com­mon­wealth Stu­dentship award to­wards un­der­stand­ing key gov­er­nance com­po­nents with­in the Unit­ed King­dom’s Na­tion­al Health Ser­vice. Specif­i­cal­ly, her study of the NHS will be­gin with a re­view of key leg­is­la­tion and cul­mi­nate in in­ter­views with health of­fi­cials. Bachan en­vi­sions her find­ings be­ing trans­lat­ed in­to pol­i­cy mea­sures that con­tribute to­wards the over­all strength­en­ing of the T&T health sys­tem as well as those of de­vel­op­ing coun­tries more gen­er­al­ly.

Found­ed in 1910, The Round Ta­ble is the old­est Eng­lish-lan­guage in­ter­na­tion­al af­fairs jour­nal and pro­vides analy­sis and com­men­tary on all as­pects of in­ter­na­tion­al af­fairs. The jour­nal is the ma­jor source for cov­er­age of the pol­i­cy is­sues con­cern­ing the con­tem­po­rary Com­mon­wealth and its role in in­ter­na­tion­al af­fairs, with oc­ca­sion­al ar­ti­cles on themes of his­tor­i­cal in­ter­est.

For more in­for­ma­tion, see https://www.com­mon­wealthround­table.co.uk/or­gan­i­sa­tion/stu­dentship-award/.