Senior Researcher, Nuffield Department of Primary Care, University of Oxford

Dr Gemma Hughes is a Senior Researcher in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on critically analysing the relationships between health and social care policy, practice and lived experience. She has 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.

At present she is investigating technologies in health and social care as part of the Virtual Presence study in collaboration with the University of Oslo (where she holds a part-time postdoctoral fellowship) and Oslo Metropolitan University.

She is also co-investigator on Witness to harm, holding to account where she leads ethnographic work on witnesses’ experiences of Fitness to Practise proceedings.

Her previous research includes the study of spread and scale-up of video consulting in the UK NHS and qualitative research into how patients and doctors make shared decisions about surgery as part of the NIHR funded Osiris programme. She developed case studies of integrated care and digital technologies for carers as part of the SCALS (Studies in Co-creating Assisted Living Solutions) programme. Her work on SCALS also involved developing a public engagement programme in partnership with the Pitt Rivers Museum: Messy Realities: the secret life of technology.

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

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

She is 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.