Development and validation of a blood cancer awareness measure

Biography

Katriina Whitaker is Lead for Cancer Care in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Surrey. Katriina was awarded a prestigious Cancer Research UK fellowship to explore cancer symptom appraisal in everyday life. Her ongoing programme of work focuses on early diagnosis and cancer, with a particular interest in healthcare-seeking and health inequalities. 

Katriina is a Chartered Psychologist and was made a Fellow of the British Psychological Society in 2017. Katriina is an expert review panel member for Cancer Research UK's Early Diagnosis & Detection Trials, Behavioural Health System and Health Economics research panel and Tenovus Cancer Care Psychosocial Advisory Committee. She also sits on the Editorial Boards for the European Journal of Cancer Care and acts as a Review Editor for Frontiers in Psychology. 

See profile

Biography

Jenny is a Senior Lecturer in Cancer Care and Health Statistics the School of Health Sciences at the University of Surrey.  Her on-going programme of work focuses on optimising health care delivery and outcomes based on data-driven approaches often informed by psychological and behavioural insights. 

Jenny has a particular interest in psychosocial care for people living with cancer and using data driven insights to improve multidisciplinary teamworking and quality of care, patient experience and clinical outcomes. 

My recent work has been particularly focused on the intersection of cancer and maternity care, and exploring how insights from cancer health services research might be adapted and implemented for other conditions or areas of care, notably maternity and obstetric care (TEAM-QI) and peripheral artery disease. 

Methodological interests include predictive risk modelling incorporating questionnaires, surveys and questionnaire design and validation, mixed-methods evaluations of complex interventions (quasi-experimental designs, feasibility studies, RCTs) and real-world implementation of electronic Patient Reported Outcome and Experience Measures. 

See profile

Biography

Athena is a Chartered Psychologist working as a Research Fellow on the Together Project. She gained her undergraduate degree in Psychology and later completed an MSc in Health Psychology at the University College London. Her Master’s thesis involved a 3-arm quasi-experimental design testing the effectiveness of a positive psychology technique for its effects on wellbeing, self-efficacy, health behaviours, health values, beliefs about medicine and stress.

After qualifying, she started working in the Behavioural Science Team at Public Health England. During this time, she conducted a scoping review on the trends in theory use across the behavioural science literature and research on emergencies and outbreaks. She also conducted qualitative interviews with individuals who were deployed to West Africa during the Ebola crisis.

Athena was awarded her PhD at the University of Southampton. Her PhD was funded by NIHR and aimed to understand young people’s views and experiences of acne and its related treatments to develop a digital intervention to support self-management and assess the feasibility of this. During the final year of her PhD, Athena worked as a Senior Research Assistant at the University of Southampton which involved further research on the digital intervention developed during the PhD.

See profile