Graham Martin

Graham originally trained in geography and after he finished his Master’s, started his first academic job as a research assistant in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Leicester, one of the departments that evolved into the current Department of Health Sciences. Graham says “I decided that I enjoyed research but did not fancy spending another three or four years on a research council stipend! I therefore looked for jobs in social scientific research that didn’t require a doctorate, and ended up in this department.” He built up an interest and knowledge in healthcare research and then spent a few years at Nottingham, where he also did his PhD. He came back to Leicester in 2009 and has been a part of SAPPHIRE ever since. Graham is currently working on a number of projects. He is working with Rupert Pearse, an intensive care specialist at Bart’s, and with Carolyn Tarrant and David Kocman from SAPPHIRE, to provide ethnographic expertise to a quality-improvement project to improve peri-operative care for people undergoing emergency abdominal surgery. He will shortly be starting another study of acute care for older people with Simon Conroy here at Leicester. He is also involved in the East Midlands Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC), a large collaboration between Leicester, Nottingham and the region’s healthcare organisations that seeks to develop, undertake and translate research that is focused on local healthcare priorities. Graham says the working in healthcare research is both intellectually fascinating and hugely important. He adds “The challenges of managing and organising the healthcare system are immense. Improving the health service is not a matter of applying simple fixes—it’s a complex organisation, and interventions don’t always work as well as they might—and they sometimes have the opposite effect to what’s intended. SAPPHIRE is one of the few places that takes a scientific approach to understanding these processes: developing ways of improving healthcare and analysing how well these work in practice.” Graham enjoys watching police dramas on the television, playing and watching football, and trying to turn his family into Derby County fans.

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