Professor Mark Pearson

I research and teach on how to get the best of what we know delivered in routine practice, with a focus on palliative care & advanced illness and its intersections with the wider health and social care system. Seeing research and practice as intrinsically interlinked, my teaching and supervision develops practitioner and researcher mobility across disciplines and sectors so that knowledge travels to where it is needed. I have a particular interest in the application and methodological development of Realist research and other approaches that work with complexity.

Before entering research, I worked clinically as an Adult Nurse in acute medicine, rehabilitation, and medical oncology, moving to social science research via an interlude exploring livelihoods in Northern Nigeria. My jump from practice to research was motivated by a desire to understand, and change, the many things that stop knowledge being used to inform practice.



My ESRC-funded doctorate investigated how knowledge was identified and used in Public Health guideline development at the (as it then was) National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE), challenging the view that only certain, narrowly-defined forms of evidence inform guideline development. Subsequently, my research career at University of Exeter Medical School and NIHR CLAHRC for the southwest peninsula (PenCLAHRC) has been applied (conducting systematic reviews to inform Public Health guideline development), methodological (developing realist synthesis for explaining implementation challenges), and developmental (engaging stakeholders in thinking through implementation questions and how research can help).



Critically applying Implementation Science has meant crossing conventional sectoral boundaries, with my research including covering diverse areas such as offenders’ mental health, health promotion in schools, and intermediate care. Working in this way gives rise to challenges that are not unlike those that ethnographers encounter where they are simultaneously an ‘insider’ and an ‘outsider’. Embracing this insider/outsider tension enables me to bring a distinct perspective.



Since joining the Wolfson Palliative Care Research Centre at Hull York Medical School in 2017, I have developed a programme of research in Implementation Science at the interfaces of health and social care relating to palliative care and advanced illness. Working in both effectiveness and theory-based paradigms, I have led studies and/or provided distinct implementation methods for research into the implementation of delirium management guidelines, breathlessness management, person-centred outcome measures, medicines optimisation, exercise programmes, and workforce wellbeing. Latterly, my work has turned towards directly informing policy through my role in the NIHR Policy Research Unit for Palliative and End of Life Care (with King’s College London) and developing local authority capacity to conduct and use research through the NIHR Health Determinants Research Collaboration North Yorkshire (co-led with North Yorkshire Council).