Tracy is Professor of Healthcare & Implementation Science in the Department of Nursing, Midwifery & Health, having joined 51 in November 2017. Tracy has a background in health psychology, with broad experience in teaching and research. She has built her academic career in the UK with appointments at Manchester University & Newcastle University, after completing her PhD in 1999, from Deakin University, Australia.
Tracy’s research focuses on how we can understand and support the implementation of complex interventions in health, care and wellbeing. Tracy is known for her work in implementation science, most notably Normalization Process Theory (NPT), of which she is co-developer, and for developing tools and assessment instruments to support non-academic users conducting implementation work in practice settings. Key areas of Tracy’s current work include development and evaluation of theory-informed implementation toolkits (eg. ItFits-toolkit), advancing conceptual and practical work on ‘tailored implementation’, and on understanding how implementation outcome measurements can be more pragmatic (eg. NoMAD). Leading process evaluations in complex intervention trials and other studies, her research is applied to a broad range of health issues, health and care interventions, and new care processes and pathways.
Key areas of expertise:
Key current projects include:
. National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) National Evaluation Team. 2025-2030.
: The development and co-design of a (person-centred) primary care (clinical) PHarmacist led Osteoporosis Review for optimising Medicines. Royal Osteoporosis Society. 2023-2025.
: Promoting values-based recruitment in community dementia support through situational judgement tests. NIHR Research for patient benefit. 2023-2025.
: Developing, optimising and implementing a blended digital self-management treatment for fatigue in multiple sclerosis. NIHR Programme Grants for Applied Research. 2022-2027.
: An evaluation of quality improvement collaboratives aligned to a national audit to improve the uptake of insulin pumps for people with diabetes. NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR). 2022-2025.
Economic and Social Research Council. 2021-2025.
: Design and evaluation of an autism-specific health check for use with autistic adults in NHS Primary Care. Autistica and NHS England. 2018-2025.
Key completed projects:
: Towards evidence-based tailored implementation strategies for eHealth. European Commission H2020. 2017-2021. Key outputs: for self-guided tailored implementation strategies and and for stakeholder engagement for implementation.
: Improving the normalisation of complex interventions: Developing quantitative measures for users based on Normalisation Process Theory. Economic and Social Research Council. 2012-2015. Key outputs: (1) and (2) .
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