Professor Anne MacFarlane

Presentation: The Leper's Squint: Spaces for Participation in Primary Healthcare

View the video of the presentation

Anne MacFarlane is Professor of Primary Healthcare Research at the Graduate Entry Medical School, University of Limerick. She collaborates with WHO Europe as a Senior Consultant for the implementation of their 2017 Migrant Health Strategy. She is a member of the NAPCRG Special Interest Group for Refugee and Migrant Health and is on the Committee on Advancing the Science of Family Medicine group for Participatory Research in Primary Care. She established, and is co-lead for, the Migrant Health Research Group in the International Collaboration for Participatory Health Research

Anne is the first social scientist to hold a Chair in academic primary care in Ireland. She has established an inter-disciplinary ‘Public and Patient Involvement’ research group at the Graduate Entry Medical School, with members from general practice, biostatistics, physiotherapy, sociology and psychology.

Her research focuses on health equity and community involvement in primary health care. She has a specific interest in migrants’ involvement in health since 2002 and was co-ordinator for the EU FP7 funded RESTORE project 2011-2015. She is currently interested in the concept of participatory spaces to enhance our understanding about the co-production of knowledge for action-oriented research. She is exploring this through implementation studies that relate to communication in cross-cultural consultations and ethnic identifiers in primary care.

About the talk

This lecture will explore how the leper’s squint is an image that we can use to develop our understanding of spaces for participation in primary healthcare and will focus, in particular, on how these spaces are experienced by migrants.

After summarising social science literature about the conceptualisation of space and what this means for primary healthcare, different spaces for participation in primary healthcare will be examined. This will show that migrants are frequently excluded from these spaces but, also, that there is evidence available to improve this situation with benefits for migrants and primary care staff.