Overview

Dr Keira Pratt-Boyden is a Postdoctoral Qualitative Research Fellow at the College for Medicine and Health with a background in Anthropology. Her work focusses on the experiences of health services. Her thesis explored the perspectives and experiences of ex-service-user activists who avoid and reject NHS mental health services in favour of their own alternative, grassroots approaches to mental distress. She has been involved in various projects working with service-users (and evaders) including tracing the experiences of ‘Open Dialogue’; a dialogic intervention for mental healthcare currently being trialled in the NHS. She is working on SAMueL-2 (Stroke Audit Machine Learning), a research project focused on the development of a machine-learning tool intended to improve practice in stroke care, and on evaluating the acceptability and implementation of this tool among practising clinicians.

Qualifications

• PhD (Social Anthropology, University of Kent) 2022
• MsC (Social and Cultural Anthropology, University College London) 2012
• AFS (University of Kent) 2020

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Research

Research interests

Keira has a long-standing interest in the experiences of healthcare and has worked across different disciplines exploring the perspectives of patients and service users. Her fieldwork explored practices and philosophies of worldbuilding among mental health activists in London. Specifically, she examined how individuals who reject health services and conventional biomedical models re-configure therapeutic approaches through everyday practices of support, politics and care.

Research projects

• SAMueL-2 (Stroke Audit Machine Learning)

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External Engagement and Impact

Committee/panel activities

• Advisory board member, APOD, (Anthropological study of Open Dialogue)

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