Lynn McVey

Lynn is an applied health researcher with a background in counselling and psychotherapy. She joined the team in November 2023 as a senior research fellow in the Improvement Science theme of the Yorkshire and Humber Applied Research Collaboration.

Lynn’s diverse career spans university management and administration, counselling and, since 2008, applied health research. She has a MA and PhD in Counselling and Psychotherapy from the University of Leeds’ School of Healthcare. Her PhD project was a qualitative exploration of counsellors’ experiences of imaginative empathy. Before joining the Improvement Science team, she worked in a range of research-related roles, from research support within the prestigious Born in Bradford study, to evaluating the impact of digital innovations in healthcare at the universities of Leeds and Bradford. Most recently, she’s worked on studies that examined multifactorial approaches to inpatient falls prevention in English hospitals and that aimed to improve the experience of patients referred to NHS services with suspected head and neck cancer.

Research interests
Lynn is deeply committed to research that has a real impact on people’s lives. As a qualitative and mixed methods researcher, she’s used a range of methodologies, including realist synthesis and evaluation, framework analysis, rapid approaches to research, ethnography, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and interpersonal process recall (a method that helps research participants remember detailed aspects of video-recorded interactions). She is particularly interested in how people respond cognitively and emotionally to the demands of their working and personal lives.