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Senior Clinical Lecturer in Primary Health Care Unit for Social Policy and Practice in Health Care

Deborah Swinglehurst joined Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) in 2010. She is a Senior Clinical Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Unit for Social Policy and Practice in Health Care in the Centre for Primary Care and Public Health. She also works as a GP in Ipswich. Deborah studied medicine at Cambridge University and Imperial College London. She has held previous academic posts at Imperial College (1998-2000) and UCL (2004-2010).

Deborah is an experienced qualitative researcher and educator. Her research explores interfaces between medicine, social science and linguistics. She has published widely on the role of electronic patient records in shaping organisational routines and clinical consultations in primary care, including ethnographic research focused on the working practices of nurses, doctors, reception staff and administrators across a broad range of activities: chronic disease management; repeat prescribing; coding and summarising patients’ records; expressions of professional ‘resistance’ to mandated IT programmes.

Deborah has recently led an initiative exploring the meanings of ‘quality’ in health care which has included organising a conference at Cumberland Lodge (2013), editing a special cross-journal collection of papers with Biomed Central (published 2015), and chairing a SAPC-sponsored public debate at QMUL (2015). She has just started leading some research within the Life Sciences Institute at QMUL (The interdisciplinary laboratory: facilitating new forms of ‘knowledge’ in contemporary life sciences) and is currently developing a project to explore medicines management in multimorbidity.

Deborah became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2005 and a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners in 2010.