Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Siobhan McHugh
Lecturer
Siobhan is a Lecturer in Health Psychology at Leeds Beckett University. Her research focuses primarily on using applied qualitative research methods to understand and improve the quality and safety of healthcare.
Siobhan is an applied health psychologist and qualitative researcher. Her key research interests include patient safety, healthcare improvement and healthcare policy across acute and mental health care. She is particularly interested in how healthcare policy influences healthcare behaviour.
Before joining Leeds Beckett University, Siobhan completed her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. Following this, she worked as a Research Fellow at the Yorkshire Quality & Safety Research Group at Bradford Institute for Health Research on a project which aimed to develop and test guidance to support more meaningful involvement of patients and their families in serious incident investigations in acute and mental health organisations. In 2020, she continued to work as a Senior Research Fellow on this project, whilst taking on leadership of a linked project to explore whether serious incident investigations following death by suicide are fit for purpose. In 2022, she took on the position of Senior Researcher at the University of Leeds working on a real-time evaluation of the implementation of a Patient Safety Incident Response Framework across the NHS in England. She joined Leeds Beckett as a Lecturer in Health Psychology in 2023.
Siobhan is currently a member of the International Association of Video Reflexive Ethnographers, a method she continues to employ as a health improvement tool in NHS organisations. She is also an Honorary Senior Researcher at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where she supports the Quality and Patient Safety teams in patient safety policy implementation.
Current Teaching
- Introduction to Social & Developmental Psychology, BSc Psychology
- Health Psychology, BSc Psychology
- Advanced Research Methods, MSc Health Psychology
- Health Psychology in Action, MSc Health Psychology
Research Interests
Siobhan's research uses qualitative and quantitative research methods. Her research focuses on exploring difference experiences of healthcare, healthcare policy implementation, learning about patient safety by understanding everyday work, and development and implementation of health improvement interventions in acute and mental health services.
Siobhan has worked on several health services research projects which aim to optimise patient safety and healthcare quality in the context of acute and mental health care. She has employed novel qualitative methods, particularly video reflexive ethnography, to support staff and organisations to understand how they work safely in the everyday, and has worked on two large NIHR funded projects focused on how organisations respond and learn when incidents occur in healthcare.
Siobhan is particularly interested in how healthcare policy prompts behaviour change at various levels of the healthcare organisation, and how we can support healthcare organisations to better understand quality and safety through the use of 'soft intelligence'.
Ask Me About
- Health services
- Interprofessional healthcare teams
- Healthcare experiences
- Health behaviours
- Healthcare policy implementation
- Healthcare incidents and investigation
- NHS
