Mrs Laura Ash

Laura is Research Fellow in the Faculty of Health, Sport and Society.

Laura is currently working with Improving Adult Care Together (IMPACT), a UK centre for implementing evidence in adult social care funded by the ESRC and the Health Foundation, and as Project Manager for Tech Enabled Care project, Building effective digital post-hospital discharge and reablement services for older adults in social care, which is looking at what helps or hinders the development and implementation of post hospital discharge services using technology and provided by social care.

Her work focuses on the relationship between lived experience, service design, and institutional learning – particularly how knowledge from the people closest to a problem can be better integrated into the systems designed to respond to it.

Prior to this, Laura has worked across a range of health and social care research. Most recently, she worked with the Institute for Social Marketing and Health on a study evaluating overdose response teams and their impact on reducing drug deaths in Scotland. Previous projects include research on end-of-life care in care homes, smoking cessation for people experiencing homelessness, children and families affected by domestic abuse, and memory keeping for children in residential child care. She is a qualified social worker with experience in statutory and third sector practice and has worked with The Promise Scotland as an Independent Research Consultant.

Laura’s doctoral research examines how experiential knowledge is captured or lost within institutional learning processes following domestic homicide, focusing on the accounts of bereaved families and the practitioners who support them. This work applies frameworks of epistemic injustice and policy analysis to understand how the knowledge of those closest to crisis fails to reach the systems designed to learn from it.

Laura is a social worker with experience of statutory and third sector social work, primarily working with care-experienced children and their carers. Laura has also worked with The Promise Scotland as an independent research consultant.

Research interests span across child and adult social care, particularly rights and welfare, participation rights in institutional learning processes, technology enabled care, implementation science, and embedding co-production into evidence and evaluation processes.

Associate Lecturer and Module Co-ordinator in Social Work