Dougal Hargreaves Research Fellow

About me

Dougal is an Improvement Science Fellow and Harkness Fellow, and Research Fellow at UCL Institute of Child Health.

Dougal was awarded a prestigious Harkness Fellowship in 2013 to spend a year studying health care policy and delivery at Harvard Medical School.

He studied medicine at Cambridge University, before completing postgraduate training in London, including posts at Great Ormond Street, Royal Brompton and St Mary’s hospitals. He has also worked at overseas at hospitals in Bosnia, Turkmenistan and Pakistan.

Between 2009 and 2011, he was Clinical Advisor to the Chief Medical Officer. During this time he was clinical lead of a project to develop universal national quality standards for NHS services seeing adolescents – the You’re Welcome standards.

Dougal completed his doctorate from University College London in May 2013. His thesis was on improving health services for adolescents in England: ‘An important focus of my doctorate was investigating how the voice of children, young people and families can contribute to improving paediatric care.’

During his Improvement Science fellowship, Dougal worked on a project to improve the care of long-term conditions in children and young people using analysis of variation to guide quality improvement strategies: ‘This was a two-phased study. Firstly, I developed a method to calculate risk-adjusted outcome measures for services for children and young people with long-term conditions and link these to unit-level quality data from national audits.

'In the second phase I will investigate how these findings can best be used at national and local levels to reduce variation and improve value, safety, patient experience and clinical outcomes of NHS services.’