Caroline Potter

Caroline Potter is a medical anthropologist with expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods health research. Her work on chronic long-term conditions (e.g. obesity, dementia, multi-morbidity) explores practices of care and provision of health services, at both personal and population levels. In her current fellowship project Caroline aims to identify the health outcomes that matter most to people living with multiple long-term conditions, and to determine how new initiatives for ‘integrated care’ (e.g. social prescribing, primary care networks in the NHS Long Term Plan) can be evaluated using these patient-centred outcomes. 

Caroline joined the Health Services Research Unit at NDPH in 2014, working within a multidisciplinary team to develop the Long-Term Conditions Questionnaire. LTCQ is a new patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) for ‘living well with long-term health conditions’. Caroline led the analysis for validating LTCQ amongst a diverse group of primary care and social care users (Potter et al. 2017, BMJ Open). More recently she led the validation of LTCQ for use in memory clinics, and the development of LTCQ-Carer for monitoring quality of life in informal (family) carers.  

Prior to joining NDPH Caroline was a lecturer in Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. She has supervised more than 30 undergraduate, masters and doctoral students to successful completion. She served from 2008 as Deputy Director of a multidisciplinary research unit (www.oxfordobesity.org), and she continues to engage in cross-disciplinary collaboration within NDPH and beyond. Caroline volunteers as an elected member of her local council and is committed to public engagement in research.