Helen is an Associate Professor in Public Health in the Department of Health Services Research and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a Health Foundation Improvement Science Fellow.
Following medical training, she became a general practitioner. A growing interest in health service quality improvement prompted a career shift into public health and, after specialty training in Public Health in the NHS, she joined the Health Services Research and Policy Department at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she is now an Associate Professor.
For the past 15 years, Helen has undertaken high-quality, multi-method health services research with a focus on quality improvement. Her work has spanned determination of the scope and scale of severe avoidable harm in hospitals, evaluation of approaches to identify and respond to patient deterioration on hospital wards and assessment of the impact of national policy on patient safety within the NHS. She has advised on national and international health policy and standards of care.
In 2019, she became an Associate Director of the NIHR- funded Quality, Safety and Outcomes of Health and Social Care Policy Research Unit. In this role and as a Health Foundation Improvement Science Fellow she has expanded her research portfolio to include research on the potential of real-time digital clinical information to drive quality improvement within and across NHS settings, approaches to cross-organisational learning for quality improvement and the measurement and monitoring of patient safety in care homes.