Louise Locock has been a qualitative health services researcher for 25 years, and has worked at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham before being appointed to a Professorship in Health Services at the University of Aberdeen in 2017, where she leads the Improving Experiences Of Care research theme. She previously worked in NHS management for several years, having joined the NHS Graduate Management Training scheme in 1984 immediately after graduating. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Louise Locock
Professor of Health Sciences, University of Aberdeen
Research Interests
Louise’s research interests are in understanding personal experiences of health and illness and how these can be used as evidence to improve quality of care. She has also conducted research into patient and public involvement, and patient experiences of health research participation. For 14 years she worked as a senior qualitative researcher with the Health Experiences Research Group, University of Oxford, where she became Director of Applied Research. Much of her research has been disseminated not only in academic publications but also on the public-facing website healthtalk.org. Since joining the University of Aberdeen, she has continued collaboration with the University of Oxford and healthtalk.org, including on several studies of COVID-related experiences. She has also led two studies of recruitment and retention of healthcare staff in remote and rural areas, a topic of particular importance in Scotland. Louise currently co-leads a workstream in an MRC-funded collaborative on multimorbidity and pregnancy, MuM-PreDiCT, led by University of Birmingham. From 2014 to 2019 she served as a member of the Health and Social Care Delivery Research funding board for the National Institute for Health and Care Research. She also contributes regularly to the Point of Care Foundation’s training courses on using qualitative patient experience for quality improvement.