Mary Dixon-Woods

Professor Mary Dixon-Woods

Professor Mary Dixon-Woods is a British academic in the field of Public Health. She is RAND Professor of Health Services Research and Health Foundation Professor of Healthcare Improvement Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is also Director of The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute (THIS Institute), and a Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge.

Career

Professor Dixon woods is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, as well as the Academy of Medical Sciences. As Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research, she leads research aimed at improving patient safety and healthcare improvement, healthcare ethics, and methodological innovation in healthcare studies.

She also acts as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of healthcare journal BMJ Quality and Safety.

Professor Dixon-Woods is an honorary professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, as well as bring a visiting professor at the University of Leicester, and a visiting adjunct professor at Dartmouth College.

In 2012 she was one of the first recipients of a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award to study 'Ethics of Patient Safety and Quality in Healthcare'. The Wellcome Trust's Investigator Awards in Medical Humanities, ranging from £700,000 to just over £1.26m over five years, intend to enable scholars to pursue individual, bold visions with greater flexibility.

Professor Dixon Woods served on the National Advisory Group on the Safety of Patients in England, which produced the Berwick report in 2013.

She also served on the review of information technology in the NHS led by Professor Bob Wachter, which reported in 2016.

Since 2017 Mary Dixon-Woods has been a Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge.

THIS Institute

In 2017 Professor Dixon-Woods was awarded a grant worth £40m over 10 years from the Health Foundation to establish and run a new institute designed to work towards strengthening the evidence-base for ways to improve healthcare. This was the single largest grant awarded by the charity to date. Professor Dixon-Woods stated at the time "The NHS, like health systems around the world, is faced with pressing challenges of quality and safety. Yet the science of how to make improvements has remained under-developed. This funding is a tremendous opportunity to produce new knowledge about how to improve care, experience and outcomes for patients. Together with our partners, the University of Cambridge is hugely excited at the chance to work with NHS staff, patients and carers to identify, design and text improvements.."

THIS Institute is the first organisation of its kind in Europe.

In August 2018 Professor Dixon-Woods was appointed Health Foundation Professor of Healthcare Improvement Studies at University of Cambridge. Of her new appointment she said: "I'm thrilled to have been appointed to this position. It is a very fitting recognition of the highly productive partnership between THIS Institute and the Health Foundation as we deliver our mission: to create an unparalleled scientific asset for the NHS by strengthening the evidence base for improving the quality and safety of healthcare."