Amy is a health services researcher whose current work focuses on support and care for people with alcohol use disorders, complex needs and high service utilisation.

Amy is a co-investigator on the Alcohol Assertive Outreach Trial (AAOT), funded by the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity and NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) South London. Her PhD is an economic and qualitative evaluation of alcohol assertive outreach treatment for people who attend hospital frequently for alcohol-related reasons, supervised by Professors Sarah Byford, Colin Drummond and Joanne Neale.

Amy has over 15 years’ experience working in the field of addiction, holding roles in central government, the NHS and academia. She joint-coordinated first King’s Health Partners Alcohol Strategy and managed a related programme of work for the South London Academic Health Science Network (Health Innovation Network). This included convening the first South London clinical and policy expert group for alcohol-related frequent hospital attenders, producing hospital care planning resources and an alcohol anti-stigma online training for frontline NHS staff.

Previous roles include supporting clinical addiction specialists nationwide by coordinating conferences, newsletters, training and workforce surveys for the Specialist Clinical Addiction Network (SCAN), based at the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse. She worked on the AMPHORA and ODHIN alcohol and public health research projects funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme and co-authored the Screening and Brief Intervention chapter for the AMPHORA e-Book.

Amy is a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow of 2017 and travelled to the United States to learn about services for high-need, high-cost (HNHC) patients. She holds an MA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Aberdeen and a Master of Public Health from King’s College London.

CLAHRC South London news piece on resources for alcohol care planning in hospitals

Resources for health care planning

Online stigma and addiction training for frontline NHS staff

AMPHORA Project

ODHIN Project

A full list of Amy’s publications can be found here.  

Research Interests

• Addiction treatment
• Complex needs and multimorbidity
• High-need, high-cost patient care
• Economic evaluation of mental health services
• Qualitative and mixed methods