Visiting Fellow, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge

Dr Mila Petrova is a social, behavioural and health sciences researcher, a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, where she’s spent most of her academic career, and an independent research consultant, currently working on a project with the Health Systems Resilience team of the World Health Organization. Outside of research, she is a psychologist and author (her first popular book, out in Dec 2022, is called House Moving Therapy).

Dr Petrova specialises in studies on ‘big and complex’ questions, set in messy contexts and requiring creative study designs. The red thread of her research is to seek evidence-based direction for action, clarity of thought, and hope where they are most difficult to find and sustain, as in humanitarian and disaster contexts, palliative and end of life care, health systems recovery and a lot more in between. She also believes in writing up research in a clear, accessible and engaging way, making it understandable and useful to policy makers, practitioners and any interested and thoughtful reader.

Below are the main thematic areas Dr Petrova works in:

• global health, humanitarian and disaster relief work (studies with refugees, in resource- limited settings, conflicts and humanitarian emergencies; ethical issues; COVID-19)
• evidence identification, evidence synthesis and knowledge management, as well as bridging the gap between academic research, policy making and practice
• digital health and innovation implementation
• communication and coordination across services using digital tools, particularly aiming at health care integration
• palliative and end of life care
• complex interventions; interventions in complex and dynamic contexts
• new professional roles and workplace relations
• patient and community engagement and involvement
• veterans' health
• research ethics
• housing and homes (while her interest in these topics is mostly in the psychology of moving houses and being at home, explored in her book “House Moving Therapy”, she’s also interested in the political, social, inequality and health issues around housing and homes).

Methodologically, she prefers mixed methods and multimethod studies, creating study-specific combinations of methods including:

• qualitative approaches (interviews, focus groups, ethnographic work)
• quantitative methods and sources of data (surveys, audits of routinely collected data, use of big data from electronic patient records)
• systematic literature reviews and research synthesis more broadly (her PhD was on methods of research synthesis, with a focus on how the evidence from primary studies gets transformed in the process of its inclusion into a synthesis study and how such transformations affect the credibility of the final outcome).
• pictorial and arts-based approaches
• textual analysis methods
• theory-based approaches (e.g. realist evaluation and synthesis, ethical analysis, etc.)

She’s also consistently expanding and refining a rich personal arsenal of what she calls ‘rigorous shortcuts’ or ‘shortcuts to rigour’ – tools that enable maximum rigour when we don’t have the time or resources for the ideal study design.

Dr Petrova's qualifications are: PhD Philosophy (Exeter); Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health MA (Warwick); Clinical and Counselling Psychology MA; Work and Organisational Psychology MA; Minor English Language and Literature; Psychology BA (Sofia University “St Kliment Ohridski”)

You can find out more about her work here: https://www.milapetrova.com