Dakin, Dr Francesca

Special Responsibilities

• EMCR committee member as Athena Swan Data Monitoring Lead
• Supports the delivery of the Society for Academic Primary Care’s Digital Technologies Special Interest Group.

Academic background

Dr Dakin holds a DPhil in Primary Health Care from the University of Oxford, and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.

She is a postdoctoral Qualitative Researcher in Digital Health, and a Mildred Blaxter Fellow in Primary Health Care department within the Medical Sciences Division. She is also a Junior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College and The Centre for Personalised Medicine.

Dr Dakin’s research broadly focuses on the implementation and ongoing use of new technologies in different clinical areas. Her current work focuses on:

• The impact of AI-enabled tools in access and triage in UK general practice on care equity
• The provision of remote care to patients on the Special Allocation Scheme (SEARCH)
• Developing an optimised model of virtual palliative care
• The use of health technologies and remote care in extremely rural and remote locations
• Her doctoral project (funded by NIHR SPCR) was an ethnographic case study of the digitalisation of UK general practice, which sought to understand how remote technologies changed the kinds of work performed by staff, patients, and teams, and how this was navigated at individual and organisational levels. This work was supervised by Professor Trish Greenhalgh, Professor Ninna Meier, Dr Tanvi Rai, and Dr Sara Paparini.

Previous projects:

• Remote-by-Default 2, co-leading two workstreams focused on workforce and access/inequalities, and working closely with The Nuffield Trust
• SLIM-CARD, conducting qualitative research integrated into an RCT on bariatric surgery outcomes
• ModCons Goes Dutch, a digital triage knowledge exchange between the UK and the Netherlands
• Independent consultancy on digital health services
• The Healthcare Improvement Studies (THIS) Institute at the University of Cambridge, contributing to a variety of healthcare improvement projects, with a particular focus on digital technologies and remote consulting

Teaching

Graduate:

• Guest lecturer on the MSc in Translational Health Sciences
• Supervisor on the MSc in Translational Health Sciences
• Advisor on the MSc in Digital Health
• Advisor on the MSc in Health Service Improvement and Evaluation

Research interests

Digital health technologies; remote consulting; applied artificial intelligence; healthcare organisations; change/innovation; health inequalities; patient access; digital triage; theory-building.

Recent Publications