Hello, I'm Gillian.
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I've been working on addiction research since 2002. I'm interested in change in addictive behaviours- how it's measured, how it's conceptualised, and how this affects outcomes or influences decision making (especially for policy makers or those with lived experience).
 
I'm a proud harm reductionist, and am keen to involve patients, service users, or other experts by experience meaningfully in my work.
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My current projects include:
  • Alcohol brief interventions, do they work, how do we know they work, and how can we improve the quality of alcohol brief intervention evaluation?
  • Drug consumption rooms and safe injecting facilities
  • Preventing overdose in Ireland 
  • Reducing harm for those with long term alcohol problems
  • Health and wellbeing in the creative sector includes mental health, substance use, coping, help seeking, and how we can improve things for the sector. Preliminary findings are available here

A selection of recent papers and their findings

Above the Clouds

Funded by Alcohol Change UK

  • What we measures varies a lot

    • 2641 outcomes in 1560 different ways

    • This makes it hard to bring together findings in reviews

    • Most often we measure weekly drinks and heavy drinking on occasion

  • Large review in ABI field​

    • Covers ​a range of topics

  • Useful if you want to know what others have done in a similar area

  • Part of the ORBITAL project

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