Mary Dixon-Woods: Patient safety workaholic

Biography

Mary Dixon-Woods is RAND professor of health services research at the University of Cambridge. Inspired to aim high by her secondary school in Ireland, she worked for four years as a civil servant on energy policy. After a first degree at Dublin City University and a statistics diploma at Trinity College Dublin, her masters degree and a DPhil at Oxford led her into health research and the issues of patient safety and quality of care. She taught at the University of Leicester for 22 years before moving to Cambridge in 2016, where she heads The Healthcare Improvement Studies (THIS) Institute, funded by the Health Foundation. The NHS, she says, has unique strengths that could be leveraged more effectively to benefit patients and staff: “Part of my job is figuring out how to do that.”