Josephine Ocloo is a senior researcher and Health Foundation Improvement Science Fellow. She is based in the Centre for Implementation Science (CIS). This is one of 5 Centres within the Health Service and Population Research Department (HSPR) at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. She is conducting research 'Developing and understanding the impact of diverse patient and public involvement in patient safety improvement activities' that will help patients to become involved in improving patient safety by working with a diverse range of service users and then evaluating the impact of their involvement in improving safety within NHS Trusts. She is a social scientist and qualitative researcher, who uses participatory and action research methods. Her main research interests include patient and public involvement and patient experience, patient safety, equality and diversity and health inequalities. She is particularly interested in bringing a more critical and social science approach to health care quality and safety improvement which tends to be dominated by positivist and quantitative approaches to measuring improvement. She originally studied for a degree in Social Science and Administration and then a masters in European Social Policy at the London School of Economics.

Josephine became involved in healthcare and specifically patient safety after her daughter died as a result of a medical failure to manage her heart condition. She previously worked as a senior lecturer in social work at London Metropolitan University, which included working at a European level on various projects and teaching at the Hogeschool Maastricht. She is an activist-scholar combining a high profile role as a patient representative and researcher in patient safety. She completed a PhD in 2008 from the University of Surrey, which looked at medical harm from the standpoint of those directly affected by patient safety incidents. She subsequently took up research posts with the King’s Patient Safety and Service Quality Research Centre and the King’s Fund, looking at different aspects of patient experience and patient and public involvement in patient safety and quality. Josephine is also a Patients for Patient Safety Champion, part of the Patient Safety Programme at the WHO and a Member of the National Patient Safety Response Advisory Panel at NHS Improvement. She has held various roles as a patient representative, working at a national level with many healthcare organisations and at a local level with NHS Trusts, her local Academic Health Science Network and CLAHRC in North West London.

Research

• Equity and Participatory research
• Patient, Public and Community Engagement
• Patient Safety and Quality Improvement
• Policy and society
• Healthcare