Dr Ruth Baxter
- Position: THIS Institute Research Fellow
- Areas of expertise: Patient safety; healthcare improvement; safety-II; Resilient Health Care; patient involvement in patient safety; positive deviance
- Email: R.M.Baxter@leeds.ac.uk
- Website: THIS Institute profile | Twitter | Researchgate | ORCID
Profile
Ruth is a post-doctoral research fellow working between the School of Psychology and the Yorkshire Quality and Safety Research (YQSR) group at the Bradford Institute for Health Research. Ruth’s three year fellowship is funded by THIS Institute (University of Cambridge) and explores how we can translate Resilient Health Care theory into practice to support improvements in the safety of healthcare.
Ruth graduated from Newcastle University in 2007 with a BSc (Hons) in Psychology, and she completed a MSc in Psychological Approaches to Health at the University of Leeds in 2013. Ruth was awarded her PhD in 2016 following a joint studentship with the YQSR group and the University of Leeds. Her research, which was funded by The Health Foundation, explored how the positive deviance approach can be applied within healthcare organisations to improve patient safety. Following her PhD, Ruth worked on a NIHR funded Programme Grant for Applied Health Research called ‘Partners At Care Transitions (PACT)’ which aims to improve the safety and experience of older people (and their family/carers) as they move from hospital to home.
Research interests
Ruth’s broad interests centre around improving the quality and safety of health care. She is particularly interested in: how we operationalise Resilient Health Care theory to support patient safety improvements; how we can involve paients and their families in enhancing patient safety; how the positive deviance approach can be applied to support healthcare improvement.
Qualifications
- PhD Improvement Science (2013-2016)
- MSc Psychological approaches to health (2012-2013)
- BSc Psychology (2004-2007)