Helen Ashdown

BM BCh (Oxon) MA (Cantab) MRCP MRCGP DCH PGDip (Health Research) DPhil (Oxon)

NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in Primary Care

General Practitioner, Beaumont Elms Practice
Co-Lead of Respiratory Theme, NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Community Healthcare
Co-Lead of Connected Care Theme, Centre for Applied Respiratory Research Innovation and Impact (CARRii)
Research Lead, Primary Care Respiratory Society
Janet Vaughan Tutor in Clinical Medicine, Somerville College

Academic GP researching how we can improve respiratory health through earlier diagnosis and health technology

I am an academic GP with clinical and research interests in respiratory disease in community and primary care. I am Co-Lead of themes in the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre (HRC) in Community Healthcare and the Centre for Applied Respiratory Research, Impact and Innovation (CARRii), and Research Lead of the Primary Care Respiratory Society.

My research focuses on improving outcomes for patients with chronic respiratory disease, through improved screening, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring. I am particularly interested in the use of novel health technology to improve respiratory diagnosis, in airways disease (asthma/COPD) and undifferentiated breathlessness, and I lead a number of projects co-led with industry to develop and test device and digital innovations in primary care. I am keen to establish platform studies in respiratory diagnosis, so that multiple novel technologies can more efficiently be tested in parallel, and I am currently establishing a platform for asthma diagnostics in primary care (Asthma-Dx).