Jennifer Voorhees

Overview

I am a PhD student in the Centre for Primary Care, and I am supported through theNIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) Greater Manchester. 

For my PhD project, I am employing community-based participatory research (CBPR) to partner with local community members--patients, carers, GPs, Healthwatch, practice staff, NHS organisations-- in all steps of designing, implementing, and disseminating research.  The focus of my work is access to general practice in the Tameside and Glossop area.  I am using a broad definition of access that defines it as the fit between a population''s needs and the available healthcare resources.  In partnership with members of my community project team, I am doing interviews, focus groups, and observation in GP surgeries to understand issues of access that people on the frontlines encounter, and analysing the data to come up with feasible solutions grounded in those experiences. 

Biography

I am from the US and moved to England in 2014 to undertake my PhD.  I was a practicing family physician (general practitioner) and health services researcher in the US.  

I completed both my undergraduate degree in History of Science/History of Medicine and my medical degree at Yale University in 2004 and 2009, respectively. During medical school I was a summer intern at the World Health Organization in Geneva, and undertook clinical, research, and public health experiences in England, the Netherlands, Uganda, and El Salvador.  

I completed residency training in family medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia in 2012. During residency I was a visiting scholar at the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care.  Following residency, I was a fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale, earning a Master of Health Science degree in 2014.