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Dr Virginia Santiago is a Clinical Lecturer in General Practice based at the School of Medicine at the
University of St Andrews with a primarily research focus.

She trained clinically in Spain, gaining her MBChB in Spain in 2005, and finishing her GP specialty training in Madrid in 2010 with Distinction. She moved to Scotland in 2011 to pursue an academic career. Since then, she has completed a MSc in Primary Care research, a PhD in Medicine at Dundee University, and has completed a postdoctoral period in St Andrews for 2 years. She is now leading her own programme of research at the University of St Andrews, which has a primary focus on
infection epidemiology (including covid-19) and antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) in community settings. She has experience on a wide range of research methods, including evidence synthesis and meta-analysis, intervention development (including trials), intervention / policy evaluation, advanced statistics including time series analysis and spatial epidemiology. She is part of the EU GRIN Network (General Practice Research on Infections), and a member of the Spanish Society of General Practice special interest group on Infectious Diseases.

In addition to conducting primary care research, she teaches on the BSc programme in St Andrews and works part-time as a salaried GP at Pipeland Medical Practice in St Andrews.

I am a Health Psychologist and Lecturer in the Primary Care Research Centre at the University of Southampton. My research involves applying behavioural science to develop interventions to improve health and well-being. I have developed and evaluated complex behavioural interventions to support people self-managing long-term conditions such as eczema, acne, diabetes, and chronic dizziness.  Much of my work has focused on how people engage with complex health interventions, and how to enhance accessibility and support for people with low health literacy. I co-created the Person-Based Approach to intervention development, which uses mixed methods to develop interventions which are engaging, accessible and motivating for end users. This methodology has been used internationally to develop successful, high impact interventions.

Mairead Murphy is a Research Fellow at the University of Bristol who specialises in mixed-methods evaluations in primary care, with a focus on remote consulting and remote monitoring of patients. She has an interest in development of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and on how to use PROMs feedback from patients to clinicians to improve communications in the consultation. Prior to her research career she worked as a management consultant, carrying out strategic planning, business case development and monitoring and evaluation projects in the health sector in the UK and Africa. She still carries out evaluations as an independent consultant, most recently leading the service evaluation of the primary care led remote pulse oximetry service for COVID-positive patients in Somerset. Her PhD was on development of a generic PROM for primary care and she is currently leading an NIHR-funded study on using this PROM to share information between patients and GPs (the COAC Study). She has also recently led the RAPCI Study, which investigated the rapid move to remote consultations in UK primary care at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I am an applied health services researcher and senior lecturer in primary care at the University of Manchester. I parallel, since October 2019, I am leading the ‘Safer Care Systems and Transitions’ theme of the NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre.

I am a psychologist by background, I completed my PhD in clinical and health psychology in 2011 and since then I have continued my career in health services and primary care.  My vision is to implement research which will be needs-driven and translatable into better healthcare polices for promoting high quality, safe primary care and interfaces. My major interests are to provide safe, high quality health care to all patients including vulnerable people with mental ill health or vulnerable people in social care systems. I am also interested in improving the wellbeing, recruitment and retention of workforce in primary care.

Improving my leadership skills is the most important challenge at this transitional stage of my career which will enable me effectively collaborate member established leaders in my field as well as early career researchers. 

I am a Population Health Scientist interested in better understanding the benefits and harms of treatments, with a particular focus on cardiovascular disease prevention. My research aims to develop tools which improve the targeting of preventative therapies for older people at those with the most to gain.

I lead the Stratified TreAtments Research (STAR) Group at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. We use data from routine electronic health records to better understand the association between treatment and harms. Our work involves prognostic modelling, systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials of cardiovascular treatment strategies (prescribing and deprescribing) in older patients.

Carol is a Senior Clinical Research Associate and GP

Carol’s work investigates the provision of complex care in general practice, and the development of interventions to improve the quality of care in general practice. Carol graduated from medical school at University College Cork Ireland and completed higher training on the South East GP Training Scheme, Ireland. She was the first National Academic Research Fellow in General Practice in Ireland, and completed her PhD in the Department of General Practice, University College Cork in 2016. Carol then worked as Senior Research Fellow on the TRUST randomised control trial in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College Cork. For her research on multimorbidity, Carol has been awarded the Early Career Researcher Award from the Society for Social Medicine UK, the Royal College of General Practitioners’ Sheppard Memorial Prize and the Professor William Shannon Prize for Primary Care Research. She has funded her research with grant awards from the Health Research Board, Irish Research Council and Irish College of General Practitioners.

Carol’s research interests include multimorbidity, polypharmacy, and decision-making in General Practice; and quality improvement, systems engineering and the operational environment of general practice. She practices as a GP two days a week.

Current position
• Department of Primary & Interdisciplinary care, University of Antwerp. Tenure track research professor
• Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium. Guest researcher
• General Practitioner. Netherlands


Key competences
• Practice of general medicine in different countries
• Health systems and primary care research, in different countries in Europe, Asia and Africa
• Linking empirical research with operational and strategic thinking
• Collaboration in national and international networks, with government actors, professional organizations

Ongoing research
Three focus areas:
1) The change in health care needs due to increasing diversity in the population, with a focus on vulnerable people and on multi-morbidity.

2) The organization of chronic care, with a focus on self-management support and collaboration with informal care givers and social care.

3) Transitions enabled by digitalisation: the potential of e-health and data management to improve health care organisation and patient-provider interaction.

Key ongoing projects:
• Horizon 2020 project SCUBY: scale-up of integrated care for diabetes and/or hypertension through roadmaps for national scale-up in: a low-middle income country with a developing health system (Cambodia), a former socialist country with a centralized health system (Slovenia), and a Western European country with a decentralized system (Belgium).
• Multimorbidity and its cost in the Belgium health care system: understanding the burden, cost and management of multimorbidity, through analysis of the national health insurance organisation data base.
• Determinants of self-management in people living with type two diabetes: examination of the motivational mechanisms of self-management and self-management support in Sweden, South-Africa, and Uganda. It builds upon a H2020 project SMART2D.

I am a GP and clinical research fellow based at the University of Oxford.  My current programme of research is on development and evaluation of an online asthma management intervention in primary care (www.definestudy.com).  The intervention involves use of the fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) breath test to guide clinical decisions during routine asthma reviews.  The work is funded by my NIHR postdoctoral fellowship and a NIHR Programme Grant for Applied Research, which I am co-leading. 

I was Oxford Programme Lead of the NIHR-funded ARCHIE programme on early antibiotic use in children with influenza-like illness who also have pre-existing risk factors for clinical deterioration.  As part of my DPhil, I also led multi-centre primary care studies on whooping cough and persistent cough in children and young adults.

I have experience of supervising MSc and DPhil students and was previously the academic GP training lead at Oxford.  I also have experience of teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and was one of the original core members of the team who developed the mixed methods research module of the MSc in Evidence Based Health Care.  I am honoured to have recently been nominated for Fellowship of the Royal College of General Practitioners.