Deborah is a GP, NIHR-funded Clinician Scientist and Professor of Primary Care at QMUL. She conducts qualitative research at the interfaces of medicine, social science and linguistics.

Her research explores a range of complex phenomena including: information technologies in practice; quality and safety of repeat prescribing; multimorbidity, polypharmacy, medical overuse and medicines optimisation. She adopts innovative qualitative methodologies to bring fresh understandings to the work done by practitioners and patients as they navigate the complexities of healthcare.

She leads the APOLLO-MM project and related projects exploring polypharmacy in practice. She is also on the core management team for the Wellcome-funded Doctoral Training Programme on Health Data in Practice at QMUL. In 2019 she was awarded the RCGP John Fry Award for her contribution to the discipline of general practice through research.

In this project she is leading a qualitative workstream which seeks to illuminate and ‘make visible’ the assumptions underpinning data modelling and analysis in this project, with a view to ensuring that project outputs are grounded in and relevant to ‘real life’ clinical practice.