Gwenllian Wynne Jones

Biography

Gwenllian is the Director of Research for the School of Nursing and Midwifery and is Professor of Nursing, in the Keele School of Medicine.

Gwen trained as a nurse at the University of Southampton (2000) and completed her BSc (Hons) in Nursing Studies at the University of Stirling (2002). Gwen's MRC funded PhD was conducted at the Arthritis Research UK Epidemiology Centre at the University of Manchester where her research focussed on the epidemiology of pain (specifically examining the role of trauma in the new onset of widespread pain) (2005).

Gwen joined the Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre at Keele University in 2005 as a Research Associate and then as an NIHR Research Fellow and NIHR Clinical Trials Fellow.

Research and scholarship

Gwen's research activities focus on examining the impact of health on work and how this can best be managed. She is particularly interested in the prognosis and management of musculoskeletal pain and other conditions commonly seen in primary care such as mild mental health disorders.

Gwen has developed a programme of research that has examined the impact of health on work and identified and explored the rates of GP certified work absence for a range of health condition. She have investigated the difficulties in measuring and managing the health and work interface in the workplace and in primary care, where GPs are the gatekeepers to sanctioning work absence. Through her cohort and qualitative studies she has identified the difficulties GPs have in managing discussions with patients around work absence. This work led to the development of a cluster randomised controlled trial that put vocational advisors into primary care to whom GPs could refer patients who were struggling with musculoskeletal pain and work (part of an NIHR programme for applied research, grant no. RP-PG-0707-10131 and an NIHR Post-Doctoral Fellowship PDF-2009-02-54).

Gwen has a strong interest in research methodologies and has been involved in the design and conduct of systematic reviews, meta-analyses, qualitative studies, cohort studies and a cluster randomised controlled trial.

Gwen's work has been funded by the National Institute for Health Research (programme for applied research and post-doctoral fellowship), British Occupational Health Research Foundation, Stoke-on-Trent Primary Care Trust and the North Staffordshire Medical Institute.

She has been awarded two Fellowships by the National Institute for Health Research.

Teaching

Gwen teaches on the Masters in Medical Science course at Keele University, specifically the Statistics and Epidemiology module. She also contributes sessions to the Public Health stream of the undergraduate medical degree at Keele.

Gwen is currently supervising 1 MPhil and 2 PhDs.

Further information

Gwen is an associate editor for the Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation.