Biography

I am currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with Professor Charles Vincent.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Experimental Psychology at Downing College, University of Cambridge. Following this I taught Mathematics in a challenging secondary school in the West Midlands before completing an MSc in Clinical Psychology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. I then worked for two years as a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford with an NHS organisation called the Oxford Patient Safety Collaborative. I completed my DPhil here in the Department of Experimental Psychology in the summer of 2021.

I am currently working as researcher for the Quality, Safety and Outcomes Policy Research Unit (https://www.qso.ac.uk/ ). This is a collaboration of researchers across several universities working to produce robust, relevant and usable research to improve the quality of health and social care and patient outcomes.

Currently I am working on a project on managing everyday pressures in hospitals. I am conducting a scoping review and interviews with senior clinicians and managers who work in Intensive Care or surgery. The aim of the project is to explore the decisions people take and identify strategies expert nurses and managers use to cope with everyday pressures. I am also worked on a project on quality in Integrated Care Systems (ICSs), which are partnerships between health and care organisations working to make care more co-ordinated for patients.

In my DPhil research I explored how to improve training and support for families who care for children with complex medical needs at home. Increasingly complex healthcare procedures are now performed by patients and families at home. Families carry out routine nursing tasks such as measuring vital signs and wound care, as well as more complex procedures such as tube feeding and mechanical ventilation. Many of these tasks were once exclusively the responsibility of healthcare professionals on hospital wards.

I worked with parents, paeditricians and nurses in the hospital and community to develop a set of videos for families new to caring for a child with a gastrostomy (a type of feeding tube). The videos help educate families, enpower them and support them emotionally. More information about the project is available here: https://www.oxstar.ox.ac.uk/more/supporting-parents