Caroline Potter

Caroline Potter joined the Interdisciplinary Research in Health Sciences (IRIHS) group in 2024 as a Senior Researcher. A medical anthropologist with expertise in qualitative and mixed methods, her research explores practices of care at community level and the integration of formal services with voluntary sector support. Within IRIHS Caroline contributes to DECIDE, an NIHR-funded centre for rapid evaluation of technology-enabled remote monitoring in a variety of health and care settings, and the MSc and DPhil programmes in Translational Health Sciences. She also collaborates on projects within the Oxford Social Prescribing Research Network. 

Before joining IRIHS Caroline was a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, where she investigated neighbourhood-level care networks as a model for healthy ageing. This built on her previous work at the Health Services Research Unit at Oxford Population Health, where she focused on quality-of-life outcomes for people living with long-term health conditions. Caroline played a key role in developing the Long-Term Conditions Questionnaire, a patient-reported outcome measure for use across health and social care settings, and she led further development of LTCQ for use by people with dementia and informal (family) carers. Caroline works within the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Oxford and Thames Valley, leading projects within the ‘Improving health and social care in the community’ research theme as a Dementia Community of Practice (DEM-COMM) fellow.

Caroline was previously a lecturer in Oxford’s School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, where she served from 2008 as Deputy Director of the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity. She supervises DPhil and Masters' students in the areas of social care and applied health research. Outside of work Caroline is a life-long dancer and served for two terms as a publicly elected member of her local council.