Professor Carl May's Exaugural Lecture Event

Health services - like other sectors of the economy - have been called on to mobilise technological and organisational innovations as a means of escaping the consequences of epidemiological and economic pressures. Understanding the dynamics of innovation and implementation in complex, and often fragmented, healthcare settings, calls for robust explanatory models. In turn, this call raises important questions. What sort of processes can such models characterise and explain? How generalisable can they be? How can they be applied?

In my exaugural lecture, I will explore these questions in relation to a programme of theory-building in applied heath research. This has led to the development of the explanatory model of the implementation of healthcare innovations that has become Normalisation Process Theory (NPT). While more than 200 studies have now applied NPT to problems in applied health research, it has always been clear that one theory cannot do the whole job of accounting for implementation processes and their effects on users.

An important part of my work in Southampton has been extending NPT to consider the impact of innovations and the work that this brings to patients and caregivers (Burden of Treatment Theory, BoT). The lecture will explore the ways that these problems have been addressed through applied heath research—focused on my contributions to a number of large complex intervention trials in the UK and elsewhere, and in a major programme of empirical work supported by NIHR CLAHRC Wessex.