Francesca H. Dakin

Background

Francesca is a Senior Digital Health Researcher in the IRIHS group. She is also a Mildred Blaxter Fellow, and a Junior Research Fellow at St Anne's College and The Centre for Personalised Medicine. 

She is currently working on:

1. The provision of remote care to patients on the Special Allocation Scheme (SEARCH)
2. Virtual palliative care 
3. AI-enabled tools in access and triage in UK general practice

Francesca’s doctoral project (funded by NIHR SPCR) was an ethnographic case study of the digitalisation of UK general practice, which sought to understand how remote technologies changed the kinds of work performed by staff, patients, and teams, and how this was navigated at individual and organisational levels. Within this, she extended and developed cross-disciplinary theory, designed and implemented a new approach to PPIE, and made novel contributions to our understanding of how digitalisation affected patients and staff. She was supervised by Professor Trish Greenhalgh, Professor Ninna Meier, Dr Tanvi Rai, and Dr Sara Paparini.

Previous projects: 

• Remote-by-Default 2, co-leading two workstreams focused on workforce and access/inequalities, and working closely with The Nuffield Trust
• SLIM-CARD, conducting qualitative research integrated into an RCT on bariatric surgery outcomes
• ModCons Goes Dutch, a digital triage knowledge exchange between the UK and the Netherlands
• Independent consultancy on digital health services
• The Healthcare Improvement Studies (THIS) Institute at the University of Cambridge, contributing to a variety of healthcare improvement projects, with a particular focus on digital technologies and remote consulting

Interests: 

Digital health technologies; remote consulting; applied artificial intelligence; healthcare organisations; change/innovation; inequalities; patient access; digital triage; theory-building

Additional roles: 

• EMCR committee member as Athena Swan Data Monitoring Lead

• Guest lecturer on the MSc in Translational Health Sciences

• Supervisor on the MSc in Translational Health Sciences

• Advisor on the MSc in Digital Health

• Advisor on the MSc in Health Service Improvement and Evaluation

• Supports the delivery of the Society for Academic Primary Care's Digital Technologies Special Interest Group.