On receiving news of her award Amaani commented:
I am incredibly honoured to have been awarded one of the Outstanding Dissertation Prizes, and would like to extend a huge thank you to my supervisors, Dr Caroline Potter and Dr Eleanor Barry, who were such supportive mentors throughout the process. Their guidance and encouragement made a big difference to my experience in Oxford, and I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with them. I’m also very grateful to my community at Reuben College for their support throughout the year, and while I was writing up.
On hearing of her award Stephanie responded:
I’m very grateful to receive this prize and to have had the opportunity to complete the MSc in Translational Health Sciences. The programme changed how I think about healthcare improvement: complex clinical systems require equally sophisticated, relational, and psychologically informed approaches. I’m particularly grateful to my supervisors Sara Shaw and Francesca Dakin and my colleagues who supported this work.
Synopses of the prize-winners’ theses are as follows:
Amaani Khan
My dissertation explored how health information is communicated, perceived, and trusted for South Asian women with gestational diabetes mellitus in ethnic minority contexts. Using narrative review methods, I screened papers and identified themes including emotional responses to diagnosis, challenges adapting dietary advice, interactions with healthcare professionals, reliance on family support, and feelings of postpartum abandonment. It was very rewarding to see the concepts we learned in all the modules make their way into my dissertation, linking back to the various theories and frameworks we covered throughout the programme. Writing up my dissertation was an experience I found very fulfilling, and I had lots of fun with it (although I can’t say I recommend an unexpected turn of events involving a kitchen knife and foot surgery in the weeks leading up to submission)!
Stephanie Fraser
My research explored how surgical teams manage complexity in the lung cancer pathway, focusing on clinical roles that work across professional and organisational boundaries. Through qualitative interviews with staff at an NHS teaching hospital, I examined how these roles help teams coordinate care for patients with complex needs.
The study found that improvements arose not from structural changes alone, but from relational work—building trust, maintaining communication, and helping teams make sense of uncertainty. I argue that meaningful healthcare improvement requires strategies that acknowledge the emotional, psychological, and social dimensions of clinical work, as well as the technical ones.