Designing an innovative cohort doctoral studies program for health professionals

Practising health professionals, driven by a desire to see the translation of research knowledge into improved patient outcomes, may wish to improve their research skills via part-time doctoral studies (D’Arrietta et al., 2022). To do so, they must maintain demanding careers within the health sector while studying part-time and externally. Parttime, external research candidates have notoriously poor success rates. To address this issue, a new and innovative program—the Cohort Doctoral Studies Program (CDSP)— was designed for higher degree by research (HDR) candidates studying in a health discipline at a mid-sized, research-intensive Australian university. This paper describes the CDSP and the associated outcomes.