My Role

I am the inaugral Dowager Countess Eleanor Peel Trust Sir Robert Boyd Fellow, a three year post-doctoral fellowship. The fellowship was awarded to my project titled ‘Living and dying in care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic: what worked well and why?’ The three stage project includes a scoping review of policy recommendations issued during the pandemic, case studies of care homes that performed relatively well or poorly during the pandemic, in terms of infections, outbreaks and hospital admissions, and a transparent expert consultation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was seconded to the Cabinet Office as a subject matter expert on adult social care. I co-ordinated the sourcing, analysis and presentation of health data on the COVID-19 dashboard, providing forecasting assessments to identify likely COVID-19 scenarios and potential indicator metrics. My role included preparing briefing notes to provide wider situational awareness on key issues, including deaths in domiciliary care and risk factors for COVID-19 outbreaks in care homes. I engaged with wider stakeholders including NHS, PHE, DHSC and the British Army to locate and access new data sources to add to the COVID-19 dashboard. I managed a team of SEO/HEOs to ensure data presented was relevant, timely and meaningful. I was awarded an MBE in the 2022 New Year’s Honours’ list for my work during this time.

Prior to this role, I coordinated the evaluation of the Manchester Macmillan Supportive and Palliative Care service. The evaluation adopted a mixed methods approach; I led firstly on the analysis of routinely collected, longitudinal patient data and secondly on conducting and analyzing interviews with patients approaching end of life and their family carers.

In my first role at IOELC, I coordinated the England arm of the EU funded PACE (Comparing the effectiveness of palliative care for elderly people in care homes in Europe) programme of research. The role involved four work programmes; overseeing the implementation of a cross sectional, mortality follow back study of fifty care homes in England, managing a cluster randomised controlled trial of 12 care homes, implementing the PACE Steps to Success intervention, including conducting interviews and focus groups to evaluate the implementation of the intervention; supporting the refinement and launch of the PACE Steps to Success intervention, a free to use resource for care homes, translated into six languages; and conducting a scoping review of strategies for the implementation of palliative care education and organizational interventions in care homes. I also supported an expert user group at the World Research Congress of the EAPC in Bern, Switzerland, to discuss the findings from the scoping review,which informed the recommendations of the EAPC White Paper on Palliative Care Implementation in Long-Term Care Facilities. In 2019, I was involved in the development of a MOOC titled “Improving Palliative Care in Care Homes for Older People”, which attracted over 1000 students internationally in its launch year (2019).

External Roles

I have presented research at the EAPC World Congress in Dublin, Madrid, Bern and Palermo, the International Reference Group on Public Health and Palliative Care, the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics European Region Congress, the Nursing Home Research International Conference and the Palliative Care Congress.

I provided input to the United Nations Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing, specifically on long-term and palliative care, through AGE Platform Europe, and have been a guest blogger for ENRICH, the Enabling Research in Care Homes network.

I am a reviewer for Oxford University Press, Palliative Medicine, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care and BMC Systematic Reviews. I have previously acted as a reviewer for the NIHR, sat on a National Research Ethics Committee (2013 to 2016), am a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a member of the Society for Social Medicine and the International Epidemiological Association.