I am Professor of Primary Care Medicine at the University of Dundee Medical School where I carry out applied research to translate basic and clinical research into effective and reliable clinical practice. I am additionally an Honorary Consultant in NHS Fife and a General Practitioner in Cardenden in Fife. I was previously a Medical Research Council Health Services Research Fellow at University of Edinburgh, an National Institute for Health Research post-doctoral research fellow at University of Dundee, and a 2006/7 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Healthcare Policy at University of California San Francisco where I was also a Visiting Professor in 2010. I regularly review for various grant-making bodies and journals, contribute to undergraduate and postgraduate medical teaching, and supervise and examine MSc and PhD students in Dundee and other universities. As well as conducting research, I serve or have served on a number of National Health Service advisory bodies, including the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Quality and Outcomes Framework Indicators Advisory Committee (which recommended which quality indicators should be included in the UK primary care pay for performance programme) where I chaired the Thresholds, Review and Retiral Sub-committee, and the Scottish Government Polypharmacy Working Group. I was the chair of the guideline development group of the NICE Multimorbidity Clinical Guideline published in late 2016. 

My main research interests are the quality and safety of healthcare, particularly in primary care and currently focused on prescribing quality and safety, multimorbidity the organisation of healthcare. I am a mixed methods researcher and collaborate with researchers from a wide range of disciplines and institutions. The methods I use include quantitative analysis of large, routine datasets; cluster randomised trials with mixed methods parallel process evaluations; and qualitative analysis of interview and observational data. My recent and current work includes development and evaluation of interventions to improve polypharmacy, examination of the implications of competing mortality risk for single disease risk prediction, and examination of the applicability of trial evidence to clinical populations.