Dr Sarah Tonkin-Crine

PhD, CPsychol
Health Psychologist and Senior Research Fellow in Primary Care
Oxford - Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences
sarah.tonkin-crine@phc.ox.ac.uk
01865 617935

I am an Associate Professor and Health Psychologist working in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. I lead a team of behavioural and qualitative researchers with the Infections and Acute Care research group.

I have a BSc and MSc in (Health) Psychology and completed my PhD in 2013 at the University of Southampton where I worked for 7 years in the primary care department as a research assistant/fellow. Through my PhD programme I am now a registered Health Psychologist with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society (BPS). I moved to Oxford in 2014, taking a post as a senior researcher and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021.

My main interest is in antibiotic stewardship and the management of infections in primary care. I am particularly interested in how to support clinicians to deliver optimal care and in designing and evaluating behaviour change interventions which target clinicians. I have worked on a number of clinical trials and conducted process evaluations within these to understand how complex interventions work. I have expertise in qualitative methods and am interested in undertaking exploratory research with populations to find out why people behave in a certain way. My previous research has involved both primary and secondary analysis of qualitative data and triangulation of mixed methods data.

I have been on a number of NIHR-funded grants and have also received funding from the ESRC and from European funders. I supervise several PhD and MSc students on a range of primary care topics. I am currently an expert member of the Government's Advisory Committee on Antimicrobial Prescribing, Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infection (APRHAI) which provides practical and scientific advice to the government on minimising the risk of healthcare associated infections.

I am keen to support primary care scientists who want to build a career in primary care research.

ORCID ID: 
0000-0003-4470-1151

Articles on this site

Working as a psychologist in academic primary care – new Psychology Group
11 Jul 2017

There are several of us who are trained psychologists working in primary care departments, across the UK and beyond, however this may not always be apparent. Psychologists run the risk of going unnoticed as a discipline if our roles don’t require us to provide specific psychology input and/or if our job titles don’t identify us as psychologists (e.g. holding generic titles such as research fellow). We need to identify ourselves and the skills we can offer for both ourselves and academic primary care to thrive.

First workshop of the Behaviour Change SIG
14 Nov 2016

The Behaviour Change Special Interest group held their first network and training day in October 2016 with a workshop focused on the Person-Based Approach to developing behaviour change interventions in primary care. The workshop was kindly hosted by the University of Southampton with support from the Centre for Clinical and Community Applications of Health Psychology (CCCAHP) and the Academic Unit of Primary Care and Population Sciences (PCPS).