Our People

Dr Charlotte Albury

Fellow, Junior Research Fellow

Senior Researcher

Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences

DPhil, PGCert (Oxon), MSc, BA (Hons) (Durham)

I am a medical anthropologist specialising in qualitative research methods, particularly conversation analysis. I am interested in using qualitative methods to explore how communication in clinical settings supports changes to health behaviours.

My research, based in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, mostly focuses on understanding relationships between clinical communication and behaviour change, including weight loss, smoking cessation, and treatment adherence. My research has contributed to national guidelines, and I have advised government and policy makers. I am a member of the NICE Adoption and Impact Reference Panel, and an honorary member of the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Linguistics. In 2022 I was the Society for Academic Primary Care (SAPC) Principal Investigator of the Year.

I currently lead a project, in collaboration with the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, researching how to optimise risk communication in case of infectious disease, and also a 3-year British Heart Foundation funded project developing evidence and training in communication about weight loss in primary care. In my FSHI fellowship I am examining how primary care staff can best communicate about tier-2 weight-management referrals with people living with obesity.

I also lead substantive qualitative work-packages on large programmes of work, including NewDawn, an NIHR funded programme of research exploring diabetes remission, and SLIM-CARD a British Heart Foundation-funded trial, looking at relationships between weight loss and surgery outcomes. I am qualitative research lead for the Health Behaviours Research Group, and design and lead research using a range of qualitative methods to better understand behaviour change in clinical settings, clinical trial processes, and implementation.