New appointments: Professors Bruce Guthrie and Stewart Mercer

Stewart Mercer

Stewart, an academic general practitioner,  joins us from the University of Glasgow, where he has been Professor of Primary Care Research since 2008. He is the current Director of the Scottish School of Primary Care, a consortium of nine Scottish Universities including Edinburgh . He is a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners (since 2006), and a previous Director of Quality at RCGP Scotland. He was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine, both in 2017. He is an Adjunct Professor of Primary Care at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and was Visiting Professor in Family Medicine at McMasters University (2017) and Melbourne University (2012).

Stewart is leading authority on the needs of people with multiple complex conditions (multimorbidity) and is internationally recognised for his pioneering work on this topic in primary care, in relations to both ageing and socioeconomic deprivation. He has also extensively researched the importance of relational empathy in the clinical encounter, and the role of novel approaches such as mindfulness in improving patient outcomes across a range of conditions.

Scottish School of Primary Care website

Image

Bruce Guthrie

Bruce has been Professor of Primary Care Medicine at University of Dundee since 2006, and is the NHS Research Scotland Primary Care Research Champion providing clinical leadership to the NRS Primary Care research network. He was previously an MRC Health Services Research Training Fellow at University of Edinburgh, an NIHR Post-doctoral Research Fellow at University of Dundee, and a Harkness Fellow in Health Policy at the University of California San Francisco.

His research interests are in the quality and safety of healthcare, focusing on prescribing safety and care for people with multimorbidity. He is a mixed-methods health services researcher, and his work is regularly published in top 10 general medical journals including NEJM, The Lancet and the BMJ. His research spans basic epidemiological and qualitative work, cluster-randomised trials of complex interventions, and applied research working with the NHS to improve quality and safety, and to facilitate translation into policy and practice. He regularly serves on national committees, and chaired the guideline development group of the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence Multimorbidity Clinical Guideline.

We look forward to Bruce and Stewart’s future contributions here in Edinburgh, and we are pleased that they have agreed to take on these roles.  Please join us in welcoming Professor Guthrie and Professor Mercer to the Usher Institute.