Gemma co-leads the Health Organisations and Policy module.

Find out more about the MSc in Translational Health Sciences

I bring practical experience and knowledge of health services to my interdisciplinary research, which has focused on critically analysing the relationships between health and social care policy, practice and lived experience. I have broad interests in how patients and the public interact with health and social care services and specific interests in how these interactions are shaped by the complexity of health and social care systems and technologies.

I am currently investigating the spread and scale-up of video consulting in the UK NHS as well as working on the Virtual Presence study of telepresence technologies to address loneliness, in collaboration with the University of Oslo and Oslo Metropolitan University.

I have previously conducted qualitative reserach into how patients and doctors make shared decisions about surgery as part of the NIHR funded Osiris programme and have also researched integrated care and digital technologies for carers as part of the SCALS (Studies in Co-creating Assisted Living Solutions) programme. My work on SCALS also involved developing a public engagement programme in partnership with the Pitt Rivers Museum: Messy Realities: the secret life of technology.

I have a professional background in the public sector in the UK, having started my career working in the areas of homelessness and mental health in the voluntary sector before pursuing a career in the NHS where I held senior service improvement and commissioning roles. 

My DPhil, completed in 2018, was an ethnographic case study of integrated health and social care for people at high risk of hospital admission.

I am committed to spanning boundaries between policy, organisational and clinical perspectives to contribute to understanding and addressing ‘real world’ problems of how to best organise care and am interested in hearing from potential DPhil students with similar research interests.