Dr Shelly Jeffcott

B.Sc. Hons. (York, Psych.), Ph.D. (Glasgow, Comp Sci.)

Shelly is happily returning to her native Australia after a 14-yr stint in the UK.  She leaves the University of Cambridge’s 'Design for Patient Safety' initiative, where her contributions focused on how systems approaches and human factors methodologies can be successfully adapted to the medical domain in order to improve current knowledge and risk management practice.

Her previous research centred on links between organisational dynamics and culture in safety-critical industries.  This began with a PhD investigating risk perceptions and attitudes toward obstetric technologies, at the University of Glasgow's Accident Analysis Group (GAAG).  She was then based at the University of East Anglia’s Centre for Environmental Risk (CER), working on a two year Health and Safety Executive (HSE) project focusing on the impact of UK rail privatisation on safety culture and risk-taking behaviours.

Shelly is passionate about patient safety research and keen to exploit her multi-disciplinary and cross-industry experience to reveal how industrial practice from a variety of other high-hazard domains might help to inform risk and safety management in a complex socio-technical system like healthcare.  Ultimately, her motivation is to build up the credibility of applied academic research in order that it can truly contribute to positive change for patients, carers, and staff.  She believes patient involvement to be essential to this process.

Contact details