Dr Jo Protheroe

Title: Senior Lecturer in General Practice
Phone: +44 (0) 1782 734884
Email:
Location: DJW 1.62
Role:
Contacting me:

I joined Keele University as a Senior Lecturer in General Practice in 2011. After graduating in 1991, I worked for the NHS for 7 years before being awarded a Fellowship by the Wellcome Trust in 1998. This I completed in the Department of Primary Health Care in Bristol while at the same time maintaining a clinical commitment in General Practice. The end result of this Fellowship was a publication in the BMJ which was also awarded the `RCGP Research Paper of the Year Award 2000.' Following this in 2001, I was awarded a 4 year MRC Fellowship during which time I successfully completed the MRes followed by a PhD at the University of Manchester. This was followed by a 5-year Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the RC-UK scheme to fund research into the development of interventions to support shared decision making in disadvantaged groups.

I continue to practice as a General Practitioner in inner–city Manchester. My research interests include: decision aids/decision analysis; facilitating decision-making in general practice with a focus on disadvantaged groups; patient participation and health literacy.

My research, influenced by my clinical practice in inner-city Manchester, is focussed on two NHS priorities - the needs of socio-economically disadvantaged patients and the need for interventions to improve patient self-management in long-term conditions. Research has shown that patients with low health literacy have difficulty in participating in their health care, resulting in poorer health. I developed a patient tool to increase participation, which is currently being used in here in the UK, and also Canada and Australia, and I am now extending the relevance of this work to disadvantaged groups through a successful NIHR Research for Patient Benefit funding to explore use of health trainers to improve health outcomes in patients with low health literacy.

As part of my interest in Health Literacy research, I have been Deputy Chair of the Health Literacy UK (www.healthliteracy.org.uk) group since 2008, and now Chair Elect.