Skip to content

Professor Jane K. O’Hara

Director of Research

Professor Jane O’Hara is Director of Research at THIS Institute, and a patient safety researcher with extensive experience of developing and evaluating interventions to improve the safety of care.

Jane spent four years working for the NHS in Scotland before completing an MSc in Organisational Psychology at the University of Sheffield in 2001, and a PhD in Organisational Health Psychology at the University of Nottingham . She leads the Safer Systems, Cultures and Practices theme within the NIHR Yorkshire & Humber Patient Safety Research Collaboration (2023-2028) and leads a large NIHR-funded programme evaluating the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (2022-2025). Jane also holds Visiting Professor positions at the University of Leeds, and the SHARE Centre for Resilience in Healthcare at the University of Stavanger, Norway. She has nearly fifteen years’ experience leading patient safety research, and a further eight years of applied psychological research prior to that. Jane has received funding from THIS Institute, the Trondheim Foundation and Research Council of Norway, and the NIHR Programme Grants for Applied Health Research, and the NIHR Policy Research Unit programme.

Research Interests

Jane enjoys a broad range of research interests spanning many healthcare improvement areas. Some of her areas of interest include engaging patients and families in improving care quality and safety, measuring and monitoring patient safety and co-production. Her other research interests have focused on exploring ways of improving incident investigation and learning, safety theory and resilient healthcare approaches, and quality and safety intervention development and testing.

 
Watch Professor Jane O’Hara’s introductory video:
 

Sign up to receive the latest news, reports and articles from THIS Institute.