Primary Care & Health Sciences

I have been a Reader in Health Services Research since 2004. I joined the Centre in 2008: prior to that I worked in Keele University’s Centre of Health Planning and Management (from 2004) and before that in the Department of Public Health Medicine of Guy’s, King’s, and St. Thomas’s Medical Schools (from 1984).

I am also the Director of the NIHR Research Design Service West Midlands (Keele University Hub) and lead a multidisciplinary team of methodologists who support clinicians from NHS organisations in developing high quality research proposals for NIHR funding streams. Finally, I am the Associate Director of Public Health (Research) for Central and Eastern Cheshire PCT, where I promotes the use and development of research by local staff.

I have a background in organizational and health operational research and a long history of research that supports the development and evaluation of health and social care services for older people. Early research concerned services for patients with stroke in the UK and mainland Europe. More recent work has focused on generic health and social care services delivered “closer to home”. For example: an SDO funded study of factors surrounding unplanned hospital admissions by older people; national and local evaluations of the Department of Health’s Partnership for Older People Project; a New Dynamics of Ageing study into ways of promoting social engagement amongst older people living in disadvantaged communities.

I supervise PhD students.

I am a member of the Faculty of Public Health.