Speakers
Annette Boaz
Annette Boaz is a social scientist with research interests in research engagement, research impact and evaluation. She has conducted research for a range of funders including the UK Cabinet Office and has recently completed an evaluation of experienced based co-design of services in two health care pathways. She worked for a number of years in the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded Centre for Evidence Based Policy.
Professor Boaz continues to conduct research in this field and is one of the managing editors of the international journal Evidence & Policy. The journal has been building an international reputation, and although only 10 years old it has achieved an ISI impact factor. She also conducts research on engaging the public and other stakeholders in research and is leading a three year study funded by the UK Medical Research Council on the role of stakeholder engagement in promoting the impact of a tobacco control intervention in eight European countries. She supports a number of initiatives aimed at increasing capacity for research use including the National Institute for Health Research Knowledge Mobilization Fellowship scheme, the ESRC Impact Prize and the UK Implementation Network.
Sonia Dalkin
Sonia Dalkin is a Lecturer in Public Health and Wellbeing in the Faculty of Health & Life Sciences at Northumbria University, England. She is also a member of Fuse (the centre for translational research in public health). Sonia has specific interests in palliative care, health inequalities and complex interventions. These subjects require a diverse methodology with an emphasis on mixed methods, realist and soft systems approaches. Accordingly, Sonia has significant experience in realist approaches, providing training in the approach throughout the UK and internationally. Her work portfolio reflects her realist experience with projects in palliative care and end-of-life care, Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and care co-ordination.
Justin Jagosh
Dr. Justin Jagosh is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for Advancement in Realist Evaluation and Synthesis (CARES) at the University of Liverpool. He is a co-investigator on the RAMESES II project to develop quality guidelines and reporting standards for Realist Evaluation. He has been conducting original research in realist methodology and participatory research since 2009. He facilitates introductory and intermediate-level workshops on realist methodology and has provided guidance on over 50 realist projects since 2013.
Mike Kelly
Mike Kelly is Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the Institute of Public Health at the University of Cambridge and Fellow Commoner at St John’s College, Cambridge. Between 2005 and 2014 he was the Director of the Centre for Public Health at the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
Aku Kwamie
Aku Kwamie is a health systems researcher based at the University of Ghana School of Public Health. Her research interests include district-level governance, and issues of complex management and leadership. Aku is also interested in realist approaches as they can be applied towards addressing implementation issues related to health governance. Most of her work has been in West Africa.
Monique Lhussier
Monique Lhussier studied Biological Engineering and Nutrition in France before joining Northumbria University in 2001 and completing her PhD in Sociology in 2007. Monique has been involved in a variety of research projects articulated around the needs of people with long-term conditions, palliative care and the engagement of 'hard to reach' groups. Monique has developed a particular interest and level of expertise in quality of life. Methodologically, as well as embracing postmodern approaches to research, she has co-developed and used variations of soft system methodology and realist evaluation and synthesis. These have been particularly successful in the analysis and articulation of complex community interventions.
Bruno Marchal
Bruno Marchal is associated professor and head of the Health Services Management unit at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp. His current research interests include research methodologies for complex issues in health, with an interest in methodological development of theory driven inquiry in health policy and systems research, and a specific focus on realist evaluation.
Jane Nixon
Jane Nixon is Deputy Director of the Institute Clinical Trials Research Jane has been part of a successful team, developing a research portfolio as a clinical trialist working with clinicians and allied healthcare professionals in cardiovascular disease, stroke, mental health and skin research. In addition, Jane leads an internationally renowned programme of research in pressure ulcer prevention and has delivered two large mattress trials (with a third in progress) as well as applied health research in areas including pressure ulcer pain, severe pressure ulcers, risk factors, risk assessment, and quality of life, with a strong practice focus.
Ray Pawson
Ray Pawson is retired. These days he spends his time: teaching his budgie to say, ‘context, mechanism, outcome configuration’; teaching his grandchildren to say, ‘disputatious community of truth seekers’; perusing the search engines for jokes about realist methodology; practicing comic timing for delivering the same in after-dinner speeches; bad-mouthing sociology for becoming the non-disputatious community of interior decorators; and bankrupting the NHS in dealing with his pensioner co-morbidities. Stealthily, secretly, unknown to anyone in the world, he is writing a new book entitled: Evidence-based Medicine and Evidence-based Policy: A Realist Tryst.
Mark Pearson
Mark Pearson is Senior Research Fellow in Implementation Science at the Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) for the South West Peninsula, University of Exeter Medical School. He has conducted realist research investigating the design and conduct of systematic reviews and guideline development at the National Institute for Health & Care Excellence (NICE) (PhD 2008), and (amongst other topics) conducted realist reviews to inform intervention development to improve offenders’ mental health, the design of intermediate care services, and the implementation of health promotion programmes in schools. He contributed to the development of the RAMESES publication standards and currently sits on the Centre for the Advancement of Realist Evaluation & Synthesis (CARES) advisory board.
Gabriel Pictet
Gabriel Pictet heads the community health and innovation unit at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Geneva. Gabriel facilitates IFRC health knowledge management and operational research, and he is promoting realist evaluation as an approach to better understand the conditions under which specific community interventions can be replicated across the 189 countries with IFRC presence.
Melanie Punton
Melanie Punton is a consultant with Itad, a firm specialising in the monitoring and evaluation of international development programmes. Melanie’s areas of focus are qualitative research and evaluation methods, social development, and evidence-informed policy. She is currently working on a realist evaluation of the Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE) programme funded by the UK Department for International Development.
Rebecca Randell
Rebecca Randell is leading a realist process evaluation alongside the ROLAAR trial of robotic surgery for colo-rectal cancer to understand how and in what circumstances robotic surgery impacts on team work and communication within the operating theatre, and is aware of the challenges in terms of recruitment, data collection and analysis in this type of study.
Professor Jo Rycroft-Malone
Jo is a Professor of Health Services and Implementation Research, currently Head of School for Healthcare Sciences and recently appointed Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research & Impact at Bangor University. Jo has established an international reputation for research that bridges the evidence – practice gap and has accumulated a body of work which in 2014 resulted in her being listed by Thomson Reuters as one of the world’s highly cited researchers (http://highlycited.com/).
She holds competitive funding from National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), EU FP7 Programme, Economic & Social Research Council, Medical Research Council and Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) to research the processes, interventions and outcomes for improving health services and care delivery through mixed methods research. She co-leads an internationally recognised Implementation Research programme at Bangor University - Implement@Bangor - and works at the interface of research and practice providing an opportunity to engage with practice and policy communities.
Jo is an editor of the International Journal of Health Policy and Management and an editorial board member of BMC Implementation Science, and previously the inaugural editor of Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing (2003-2013) and associate editor of BMC Trials.
Jo has been an adviser and member of a number of international and national and strategy development ‘think tanks’ and funding groups, including the English Chief Medical Officer’s ‘Clinical Effectiveness Research Agenda Group,’ and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research’s Knowledge Translation and Exchange and Evidence Synthesis committees. In 2012, she was appointed as Chair of the National Institute for Care and Health Excellence’s (NICE) Implementation Strategy Group. She has been involved in the NIHR for a number of years through her membership of the Service Delivery & Organisation Programme commissioning panel, Knowledge Mobilisation Fellowship Scheme, and as a member and deputy chair, of the NIHR’s Health Service & Delivery Research Programme’s commissioned research board. She has recently been appointed as the Director for the NIHR Health Services & Delivery Research Programme and takes over this role in Autumn 2015
Elliot Stern
Elliot Stern is a practicing evaluator and an active member of the international evaluation community. He is Emeritus Professor of Evaluation Research at Lancaster University (UK) and honorary research fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Elliot edits the journal Evaluation: the international journal of theory, research and practice published by Sage (UK); was founding President of both the UK Evaluation Society and the International Organisation for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE); and is a past President of the European Evaluation Society. Elliot currently works with the Regional Development Directorate of the European Commission; the UK’s Department for Energy and Climate Change; the CGIAR (Collaborative Group on International Agricultural Research); UNDP; OECD; and a number of NGOs and community organisations.
Nick Tilley OBE FAcSS
Nick Tilley is professor in the Department of Security and Crime Science at UCL, Adjunct Professor in the Griffith Criminology Centre in Brisbane and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Nottingham Trent University. He co-authored Realistic Evaluation with Ray Pawson. He is presently taking part in research on the international crime drop (funded by ESRC), the prevention of youth sexual abuse and violence in Australia (funded by the Prime Minister and Cabinet Office), and in support of the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction (funded by the ESRC and College of Policing).
Liz Turner
Liz Turner is a Principal Consultant with Itad. Liz focuses on the design and implementation of evaluation methods for complex private sector development, agriculture and trade programmes. She is currently designing and employing realist evaluation approaches for three impact evaluations of DFID funded programmes in East and West Africa, all at different stages of implementation.
Sara Van Belle
Sara Van Belle is a political scientist and cultural anthropologist, currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Tropical Medicine. She has been active in health policy, implementation, evaluation and research in low and middle income countries for 15 years, working with multilateral and bilateral aid agencies and INGOs. Her expertise is in governance, public accountability and community participation, organizational and institutional development, capacity building, health systems and sexual and reproductive health.
Rebecca Walwyn
Rebecca Walwyn is a Principal Statistician, specialising in randomised trials in a mental health context, working on the design and analysis of trials of complex healthcare interventions. She has published methodological work on therapist effects, specifically in terms of sample size estimation for trials with multiple-membership clustering effects and meta-analysis. She is working on experimental designs that incorporate the complexities in complex interventions to provide evidence regarding empirically optimal complex interventions.
Gill Westhorp
Dr Gill Westhorp is a specialist in realist research and evaluation methodologies, with an interest in the relationship between realist and complexity theories. She is Director of a small research and evaluation consultancy company specialising in realist approaches; a Professorial Fellow at Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia; an Associate at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia; a member of the core team for the RAMESES I (standards for realist synthesis) and RAMESES II (standards for realist evaluation) projects based in Oxford, UK; and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Centre for the Advancement of Realist Evaluation and Synthesis (CARES) at Liverpool University, UK.
Geoff Wong
Dr Wong is Clinical Research Fellow at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford and a part time General Practitioner in London, United Kingdom. He is an experienced realist researcher. His doctoral thesis in 2009 on the use of the Internet in medical education was a realist review and was supervised by Professors Ray Pawson and Trisha Greenhalgh. He has worked on or provided methodological support to over a dozen realist projects. He regularly speaks on and teaches realist approaches nationally and internationally.
He gained his medical degree from the University of Cambridge and the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guys and St Thomas’ Hospitals, London, UK in 1993. He has worked at University College London and Queen Mary, University of London before his current post. He led on the RAMESES project (www.ramesesproject.org) to develop quality and publication standards and training materials for realist reviews. Currently he is leading the RAMESES II project to develop quality and reporting standards and training materials for realist evaluations.