Outstanding Early Career Researchers Award 2026: Meet the winners – Dr Francesca Dakin

What is your main area of research, and what do you find is the most interesting aspect of your work?

I use mostly qualitative methods to understand the impacts of implementing new technologies in health services, primarily in the general practice context. For my doctorate, that was focused on digitalised general practice, particularly the introduction and scale-up of remote access and remote consulting technologies. Recently, I have also worked on wearable technologies for long-term conditions in rural and remote populations, virtual palliative care, direct-to-consumer medical tests, and Dutch digital general practice. Currently, my research focuses on AI-enabled access and triage tools in UK general practice, supported by a Mildred Blaxter Fellowship from the Society for the Sociology of Health and Illness. 

In terms of the most interesting aspects of my work, I find the people and context I get to work with fascinating (unsurprisingly!). General practice draws together a really special group of people. Through doing embedded research in this setting for several years, I’ve seen how people in this setting go above and beyond, daily, to deliver care to a patient caseload that includes every one of us. Seeing up close the impacts of that work (and its digitalisation) on patients and staff has highlighted to me the uniqueness of primary care.

Even when researching technologies in other contexts, I am reminded of the GP setting; not only the front door of the health service for all secondary care, but also the site at which a patient’s identity is first formed, where candidacy for care is first established and negotiated, and where patients are held and cared for around the punctuation of secondary care interactions. 

What are some of the challenges you’ve faced as a researcher, and how did you overcome them?

Loads of challenges! I’m not sure whether I have overcome all of them, but I have puzzled through them with the help of supervisors, mentors, and friends. I’ll go for two big ones that jumped to mind:

1. Researcher identity: Particularly as an early-career researcher, it feels both incredibly important and impossible to articulate your research identity. In terms of your methodology, topic area, or even job title. These are things that often must flex and change with projects, short-term contracts, and as we develop our interests and skills over time. This is something a senior professor drew my attention to during my DPhil, and he led me to think carefully about my history, influences, and the kinds of research that were important to me, so that I could begin actively crafting a research identity that reflected them. Holding onto those threads – of qualitative methods, implementation, digital technologies, and primary care -has been helpful in maintaining a stable identity and clarity of research interests whilst working on multiple projects.
2. Topic creep: Doing qualitative research in such a complex socio-technical setting can be a real challenge. It’s quite easy to lose yourself (and the research question!) in that complexity, when one’s view of the ‘thing’ under study becomes saturated with broader contextual information. Talking about this challenge openly with peers and senior colleagues has helped me realise that, rather than a challenge, navigating that messiness is a necessary part of doing high-quality qualitative research. Immersion in the reality of general practice inevitably means that things other than the object of study become evident. Indeed, these broader contexts are usually critical in understanding the ‘thing’ itself, and how it works (or doesn’t) in that setting. For example, in studying technologies in UK general practice, I also came to study patient candidacy, staff wellbeing, working conditions, relationships and coordination. Thus, a linked challenge is knowing when to create boundaries around your project: which alleys to follow, and which to shelve. I think (hope) that’s something all qualitative researchers continually renegotiate.

What will the RCGP/SAPC Early Career Award enable you to do?

Following my Visiting Fellowship earlier this year, I am developing an (unfunded) collaborative policy review with researchers at Macquarie University to compare international guidelines and standards for the safe use of AI-enabled technologies in healthcare (including primary care). We believe it is critical to compare these emergent official guidelines internationally, given that the tools (and their use) are expanding rapidly, so we can learn from what works (and what doesn’t) across nations. This will help us move more quickly towards international safety standards more appropriate to this international phenomenon. I will use this award to contribute towards its publication fees. 

What advice do you have for people who want to work in primary care research?

I would strongly encourage anyone interested in primary care research to take the leap: reach out to possible collaborators, apply for the grant, and talk to people working and receiving care in primary care. General practice is a site of continuous change, constantly responding to internal and external pressures to deliver patient care, and the more research attention we can put into it, the better. 

To deliver that work sustainably, I would advise future primary care researchers to ensure they are always building and tending to their network of people. That includes strong connections to real-world primary care staff and patients to enable the research itself, and a support system of peers, mentors, and colleagues who can advise on navigating the inherent challenges of doing healthcare research and being an early-career researcher more broadly.