Dr Lucy Johnson, BA (Hons), MSc, PGCert, PhD, AFHEA

Profile

I am a research fellow in Health Equity working within the Clinical Effectiveness Group (CEG). I am working with Dr John Ford on a 5-year NIHR funded project focused on quality improvement and health equity. My academic interest lies in the interdisciplinary application of social science principles and theory in order to improve health inequalities in the UK. More broadly, I am interested in ethnographic and participatory methods, realist synthesis and evaluation, and theorising new approaches to research methods and ethics in the post-covid world.

In 2023 I completed a PhD in medical anthropology at Durham University, supervised across the departments of anthropology and biosciences. My PhD took an ethnographic approach and explored the various health inequities experienced by women who live with chronic pain in North East England. Prior to this, I completed an MSc in Global Mental Health at Glasgow University. I also hold a BA (Joint Hons) in Archaeology and Anthropology from Durham University.

Research

Research Interests:

My research interests are centred around using qualitative methods to understand how health inequalities are experienced. I am especially interested in exploring geographical areas where there are large differences in outcomes (e.g the North-South divide in England) and looking at the impact of deprivation on poor health.

I am keen to draw from my background in medical anthropology, and apply some of the theoretical concepts core to the discipline to pressing health inequalities issues more generally. In my current postdoc, I am taking an interdisciplinary approach and applying realist approaches to help policymakers and practitioners understand how quality improvement projects can be used to promote health equity.