I am an experienced qualitative researcher working in the Policy Innovation Research Unit at the School. Here I have been engaged in evaluating a range of health and social care policy initiatives, I am currently working on a large mixed method national study to evaluate the Organ Donation (Deemed Consent) Act in England. As a named co-investigator for this project, I contributed to writing and developing the research proposal and research/ethics approvals. I am leading on a case study to investigate the implementation of the Act within healthcare trusts. Recently I have been required to take a more project management and co-ordinating role for this work. This has meant much more high-level involvement in the overall project, supporting the PI and other members of the research team, liaising with the funders (DHSC policy and research team) and other key stakeholders, to ensure that the project meets its key milestones for reporting and disseminating outcomes.

I am also contributing to a mixed method study looking at food provision in early years settings in England, where my focus has been parental understanding and experience. Two papers have recently been submitted from this work, one of which I am lead author. Prior to this I led the qualitative arm of a national evaluation of heatwave planning in England. I formed part of a small team to write and develop the research proposal and led on the process of gaining NHS and LSHTM ethics approval. My role involved setting up, undertaking and coordinating the data collection and analyses within five case study sites in England. I had also contributed to other elements of the evaluation, including taking a prominent role in making links with nursing bodies to develop a survey of nursing and frontline care workers, and helped develop questions for a general public survey. I was lead author for the final report of the evaluation and co-authored a paper reporting the findings on heat health risk behaviour from the survey and qualitative interviews.

I have also made a significant contribution to understanding personalisation for older people in care homes through two major projects: evaluating the introduction of direct payments in long term residential care in England as a way of better personalising the care and services received, and another study to explore more about personalisation in care homes, and how this is conceptualised by those delivering and inspecting services. This work led to a series of papers, many of which I led or co-led on, published reports and presentations both nationally and internationally

I have also contributed to PIRU’s work investigating the legacy of Policy Pilots and contributed to a paper recently published in special series in Governance.