Speaker

Deborah Swinglehurst is a senior academic GP with over 30 years of clinical experience and is Professor of Primary Care at Queen Mary University of London. She has an international profile as a qualitative researcher and leads the APOLLO social science research group. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work explores the interfaces between medicine, social science and linguistics with a particular focus on the role of interaction and social relationships in health care settings. She brings a scholarly lens to the 'hidden' work done by practitioners and patients as they navigate the everyday complexities of health care and uses these insights to create ‘practice-based’ evidence to inform practice and policy.

She has recently been leading a programme of work on polypharmacy (the use of multiple medicines) in older adults as an example of medical overuse, with a focus on ‘higher risk’ polypharmacy. Building on this work she has created freely-available educational resources for clinicians and a set of fictional stories for patients to prompt people to think differently and talk differently about medicines.

She is a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.