The Team: New Models of Care

Stewart Mercer is a General Practitioner, Professor of Primary Care and Multimorbidity and Director of the Scottish School of Primary Care. His research focuses on understanding and responding to the needs of people with multiple complex conditions.

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Eileen Kaner is Professor of Public Health and Primary Care Research and an applied behavioural scientist with expertise in intervention-based research; she is also Director of the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration for the North East and North Cumbria region of England.

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Barbara Hanratty is a GP, Professor of Primary Care and Public Health and deputy director of the NIHR Policy Research Unit for Older People and Frailty. Her research concerns older people, with a focus on the health and social care interface, end of life and long term care.

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Susan Shenkin is University of Edinburgh Reader, and NHS Lothian Consultant, in Geriatric Medicine. She is NRS Ageing Specialty Lead and co-chair of ENRICH (Enabling Research in Care Homes), and her research focusses on the causes and impacts of ageing, particularly for people with dementia or delirium, and those who live in care homes.

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Bruce Guthrie is Professor of General Practice at the Usher Institute, in the Edinburgh Medical School.

Bruce is a mixed methods health services researcher with an interest in the quality and safety of health and social care, particularly in relation to multimorbidity and polypharmacy. As well as research, he works clinically as a GP and works closely with the NHS and government to improve healthcare quality and safety.

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Amy O’Donnell is Professor of Applied Health and Social Care Research at the Population Health Sciences Institute. Newcastle University. Her work focusses on using complex systems approaches and digital technology to improve outcomes for patients with multiple complex needs over the life course.

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Helen Frost has been involved in a wide range of clinical and public health research for over 25 years. Early in her career, Helen worked in the NHS in England as a physiotherapist, developing and evaluating complex interventions alongside clinical practice. Prior to completing a PhD in Public Health at the University of Warwick in 2007, she was the Director of Physiotherapy Research at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford. In this role she was awarded funding from the MRC and other charities to lead several complex randomised trials of physiotherapy and surgical interventions.

In Scotland, Helen joined the ‘Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research and Policy (SCPRHP)’ and led the ‘Later Life Working Group’ where she developed skills in reviewing and evidence synthesis. In 2014, she joined the NMAHP Research Unit at the University of Stirling, where she gained further experience in Implementation Science, working with the Scottish Improvement Science Collaborating Centre (SISCC). More recently, Helen has worked as a lecturer and researcher in Health and Social Care at the University of Stirling and Edinburgh Napier University.

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Tricia Tooman is a health services researcher with expertise using a knowledge systems lens to understand healthcare improvement. Her background as a social scientist includes medical education research and learning and change management. Tricia has been involved in a wide range of research projects including the Scottish Doctors' Wellbeing Study, Transitions of Healthcare Graduates and the Impact of Covid-19 and Embedded Models of Knowledge Co-Production. She completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2019 and studied the interconnection of research, policy and practice for improving sepsis care in Scotland.

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Bruce is a mixed methods social researcher specialising in qualitative and ethnographic research methods. He has worked on a variety of research projects over the last 25 since completing his PhD in Folklore studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Since joining the Usher Institute in 2008, he has worked on projects in palliative care focusing on health services research into the issues around providing primary palliative care in the community and the use of screening for future care planning using AnticiPal and SPICT(tm). He is the first member of staff working with the Green Social Prescribing Project.

Atul Anand is a Senior Clinical Research Fellow. He is interested in the use of routine health and social care data to improve outcomes for older people. This is in line with his clinical work as a consultant geriatrician at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. Atul is the clinical data lead for the DataLoch programme – a data repository of health and social care data in South East Scotland – that is improving access to research-ready datasets for the region. He is interested in understanding the impact of multimorbidity in our population, and refining the way we establish the presence of chronic health conditions from electronic health records. He is a co-investigator on the AIM-CISC Programme in which we are better defining multiple long-term conditions using datasets from across the UK. He is also interested in the use of routine electronic health records in hospital to identify frailty and rehabilitation needs. He is a passionate advocate for these methodologies to improve representation and inclusion of older people in clinical trials.