Four UK professionals selected to be Harkness Fellows 2022–23

The Commonwealth Fund has chosen four health care policy and practice professionals from the UK to be part of the 2022–23 Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy and Practice – a unique opportunity to spend a year in the United States conducting research, with mentorship from leading US experts. 

The Harkness Fellowships were established by The Commonwealth Fund in 1925 and were modelled after the Rhodes Scholarships. The Fellowship provides leadership development experience for mid-career professionals — policymakers, researchers, clinical leaders, health care executives and journalists — from the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Singapore. 

In the UK, the Harkness Fellowships have been supported by the National Institute for Health Research since 2010 and the Health Foundation since 2016. 

The Harkness Fellows will be placed with mentors based at organisations such as Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Duke University, Harvard University, Kaiser Permanente, RAND Corporation and Stanford University. They will study issues relevant to The Commonwealth Fund’s mission to support a high performing health care system. This includes insurance coverage, access and affordability, health care delivery system reforms, cost containment, and other critical issues on the health policy agenda in both the US and other countries. 

The Fellows will be expected to publish the results of their research, which may include peer-reviewed journal articles or reports for a high-level policy audience. 

The 2022–23 UK Fellows are: 

• Rebecca Fisher, General Practitioner and Senior Policy Fellow at the Health Foundation, who will research how primary care practices can increase access to telemedicine for under-served populations. 
• Zainab Garba-Sani, Clinical Innovation Manager at NHS England and NHS Improvement, who will research how ethnicity influences public perception of the use of artificial intelligence in health and care. 
• Aoife McDermott, Professor of Human Resource Management at Cardiff University, who will use job quality as a lens to explore factors influencing the recruitment and retention of primary care physicians. 
• Emmert Roberts, Clinical Research Fellow at the National Addiction Centre, King’s College London and a Consultant Addiction Psychiatrist at the South London and the Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, who will explore to what extent opioid overdose mortality and hospitalisation patterns in the US differ among sexual and gender minority groups. 

More information about the Harkness Fellowship, including details of the full cohort of 2022–23 Fellows, can be found on The Commonwealth Fund website. 

Applications for the 2023–24 Harkness Fellowships are open and will close on 1 November 2022. 

To apply for the Harkness Fellowships, access the application form via The Commonwealth Fund’s Harkness Fellowships portal.