Health Behaviours Team

I am a tutor on the MSc in Evidence Based Health Care programme. I also supervise Medical School undergraduate and postgraduate student projects. 

My research focuses on the delivery and evaluation of brief interventions and pharmacotherapies for smoking cessation in primary care. Although there are effective treatments to help smokers stop smoking, many are unwilling or unable to quit. Novel methods are required to encourage smokers to take up support for stopping smoking and my research explores different ways in how we can achieve this.   

I currently hold a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the NIHR, to examine the effectiveness of GPs and nurses offering brief advice and an e-cigarette to smokers with chronic illnesses who are unwilling to stop smoking. I am conducting a randomised controlled trial to test the effectiveness of the approach compared with usual care, on reducing smoking and encouraging smokers to quit. This work includes an embedded qualitative interview study on patients’ and practitioners’ perspectives on e-cigarettes, and a study using conversation analysis of recorded consultations to understand how practitioners deliver the brief intervention and how patients respond. Our goal is to identify ways to improve communication between patients and practitioners and develop effective ways of delivering brief interventions for smoking cessation.

I also work with the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group on a number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, including reviews on e-cigarettes for smoking cessation and interventions to reduce harm from continued tobacco use.