Alison Chisholm

I was awarded a British Academy Innovation Fellowship for Citizens' Voices Making Change, to research and evaluate interventions to enhance the impact and legacy of citizens’ assemblies and citizens’ juries to tackle health inequalities and climate change, partnering with Involve.

In 2022 I worked with colleagues from the Global Centre on Healthcare and Urbanisation to design and deliver Street Voice, a Citizens' Jury to find common ground on solutions to the impact of travel on health and climate change, in Oxford.

Traffic and travel have an impact on people’s health and climate change, but it can be difficult to find transport policy solutions that work for everyone. All voices need to be heard on this issue, and citizens’ juries are a tried and tested, inclusive and balanced method that help communities solve local problems.

We aimed to create an opportunity for local residents to understand each other's views and experiences, and to reach decisions that people can agree on about how to make Oxford an inclusive, fair and safe place to move around in ways that are good for people’s health and the environment.  Deliberative democratic process generate policy recommendations, and help to deepen democracy and empower local people. 

My academic background is in health psychology and health services research. I have expertise in patient experiences of health care, quality improvement, decision-making, staff experiences and the regulation of healthcare professionals. I have carried out research on patient experiences of a wide range of conditions including maternity, cancer and heart disease. 

I joined the Department in April 2016 to work with Professor Louise Locock on the NIHR-funded US-PEx study which aimed to better understand how NHS frontline staff use different types of patient feedback to improve health services and develop tools to help them make better use of this data. 

I have worked with Dr Lisa Hinton and Professor Richard McManus on SNAP2, developing an intervention to optimise the management of blood pressure following hypertensive pregnancy, and the BuMP trial, a large randomised controlled trial to determine whether self-monitoring of blood pressure can help detect hypertension (raised blood pressure) and pre-eclampsia earlier, resulting in faster access to treatment.

Self-monitoring has the potential to improve the detection and management of raised blood pressure in pregnancy by providing much more data on blood pressure without a large increase in burden for women, who might not need to attend hospital so often. Increasing women’s involvement through self-monitoring could underpin a new cost-effective model of care during pregnancy which improves women's experiences and delivers quality outcomes.