Professor Andrée le May’s longstanding focus on research implementation began in 1986 as Specialist Nurse for R&D at a District General Hospital in West London, a role created to move research into practice across NHS professional groups, specialties and organisations. Staying close to practice through research, service development and education, she has since then taught/mentored/supervised postgraduate students in knowledge management/mobilisation, quality improvement, change-management and clinical leadership. Her research expertise focuses on developing and evaluating implementation techniques especially communities of practice, co-producing evidence-based practice/policy change and researching quality improvement skills. Most recently she has mentored two NIHR Knowledge Mobilisation Fellows; presented a leadership seminar on the value of stories to Johnson & Johnson global executives; published, with others, on a wide number of topics related to implementation such as Forum Theatre, storytelling, and impact assessment and worked closely with John Gabbay to develop their ‘Mindlines Model’ and the effect it has on the successful implementation of evidence. (https://www.routledge.com/Knowledge-Transformation-in-Health-and-Social-Care-Putting-Mindlines-to/Gabbay-May/p/book/9780367746162)
She is Professor Emerita of Nursing at the University of Southampton, Honorary Visiting Senior Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Editor-in-Chief for the National Institute of Health Research’s Health Services and Delivery Research, Public Health, Global Health and Programme Grants for Applied Research journals and co-editor of the Journal of Research in Nursing. She has sat on various research/ implementation funding panels, most recently The Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) Healthcare Cancer programme which is part of the UK government’s and NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSEI)’s innovation portfolio.
She retired last year as the joint Implementation Lead at the East of England ARC bringing full circle her practical work on implementation within the NHS by co-designing an implementation learning resource ‘art gallery’ featuring the work at the East of England Applied Research Collaboration (https://arc-eoe.nihr.ac.uk/gallery) and working with film as a medium for dissemination.