Cohort 10

Associate Professor General Practice and Rural Medicine 

My current post is Associate Professor in General Practice and Rural Medicine, based at Mackay Rural Clinical School which is attached to James Cook University College of Medicine and Dentistry. Mackay is a small town of 100,000 people in North Queensland, and is situated 400km from the nearest tertiary referral centre in Townsville, and 1000km from the nearest capital city in Brisbane.

I am originally from the UK, and completed my medical degree at Liverpool University, and moved to Australia two years after graduating and settled in Queensland. I completed my postgraduate training in General Practice in Australia, and embarked on an academic career when the first cohort of JCU medical students arrived in Mackay in 2004.

My current role involves co-ordinating the general practice undergraduate placements in Mackay, chairing Year 5 (exit) assessment, and co-ordinating the JCU undergraduate honours program in Mackay. I currently supervise 12 research honours students and one PhD student. I addition I still work clinically in general practice, and also in a sexual health clinic

My major area of research interest is the GP management of skin cancer. I have been principle investigator in a series of practice based randomised controlled trials investigating wound management and interventions to prevent surgical site infection, some of which are ongoing. I am also interested in GP diagnostic accuracy and melanoma management.

Other areas of interest are sexual health, otitis externa, immunisation, medical student assessment and systematic review. I have published 40 peer reviewed journal articles.

Senior Research Fellow 

Senior Research Leader and Head of Department

Dr. Iveta Nagyova is a Senior Research Leader and Head of the Department of Social and Behavioural Medicine at Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Kosice, Slovakia (UPJS; www.sbm.upjs.sk).

She is also a President of the Section on Chronic Diseases at the European Public Health Association (www.eupha.org) and a member of the Platform for Healthcare Innovations at the Institute of Health Policies, Ministry of Health of the Slovak Republic. She graduated in Psychology at UPJS and obtained her PhD in Medical Sciences from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Her research interests are in psychological and social adaptive processes in patients with chronic disease. Apart from studying changes in quality of life over time and the psychological mechanisms of adjustment, her recent interests are in the wider implementation of this knowledge into integrated models of care as well as the links between behavioural medicine and public health.

She is a (co)author of more than 70 peer-reviewed international scientific articles; her h-index is 16. As a project partner and national coordinator she has been involved in over a dozen European projects, including FP7 projects.

Since 2004 she has served as a supervisor at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where she has been leading a group of 17 PhD students, 16 of whom have already defended their PhD theses. She also serves as an advisor to the WHO Country Office in the Slovak Republic and the Slovak Ministry of Health in the field of chronic diseases, integrated care and public health.

Medical Staff 

- Medical studies in Hannover/ Freiburg, Germany, Visp, Switzerland and Mobile/San Diego, USA
- Doctoral thesis in Computional Neuroscience at the University of Tuebingen, Germany (chair: Prof. N. Birbaumer)
- Active Family Physician in a rural group practice near Berlin, Germany
- Six years researcher and lecturer at the Institute for General Practice, Jena University Hospital, Germany
- Member of the executive committee of the Institute
- Ongoing research:
o Aftercare of critical illness in primary care
o Mental health in primary care
- Co-ordinator of a large RCT in primary care based aftercare for sepsis survivors (Smooth-study)
- Co-ordinator of the residency program in Family Medicine at Jena University Hospital
- For three years national co-ordinator of the Hippokrates exchange program by the Vasco da Gama Movement (WONCA)

Senior Lecturer Research

My first degree is in sociology and I specialised in medical sociology for my PhD. I have worked in Departments of Primary Care (Birmingham, Kings College London and UCL) since 1996. I was appointed to UCL as a lecturer in 2001 and promoted to senior lecturer in 2008. I provide a sociological perspective and qualitative methodological expertise to clinical research questions across a range of clinical areas, working in multi-disciplinary teams.

I am currently Associate Director of the E-Health Unit at UCL and convene a stream on interactions between health care professionals and patients. All of my research is encompassed by the following themes: (i) the construction of decision making about medical care, (ii) the impact on communication of complex interventions, technology and treatment adherence and (iii) patient and public involvement in medical research and education.

I am currently on sabbatical for five months, splitting my time between the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences in Oxford and the Faculty of Health Sciences in Southampton, working on developing an application for an NIHR Senior Research Fellowship.

I strongly believe that research and teaching are mutually beneficial and I lead on postgraduate and undergraduate teaching in research methods and medical sociology.

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.

Senior Lecturer Centre for Academic Primary Care

I joined the Centre for Academic Primary Care at the University of Bristol in 2004, having previously worked at the Medical Research Council’s Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow.

I am a senior qualitative researcher. My main research interests are integrating qualitative studies within randomised controlled trials and the management of depression in primary care. My work within trials has been used to improve their design, conduct and recruitment, and to inform the development of interventions, assess intervention fidelity and interpret trial results. Most of the trials I have been involved with have been in the area of mental health, which led to my interest in the management of depression. These trials and various stand-alone studies have allowed me to explore patients’ views and experiences of different treatments for depression, in order to identify ways to improve treatment adherence and effectiveness.

I am a theme lead within the CLAHRC west, providing guidance and support to eight researchers employed within the Ethnography theme. I am also an affiliate member of the MRC ConDuCT-II methodology Hub, a collaborator on the University of Bristol’s Biomedical Research Unit, and a committee member for the NIHR Research for Patient Benefit (RfPB) South West region.

My teaching commitments include leading the Human Basis of Medicine unit, which forms a substantial part of year 1 of the MB ChB degree course, teaching undergraduate medical students, contributing to short courses delivered within the School of Social and Community Medicine, and supervising doctoral and post-doctoral students.