Professor Debbie Sharp is Professor of Primary Health Care in the Centre for Academic Primary Care at the University of Bristol. She was previously Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer at the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy’s and St Thomas’ in the Department of General Practice, and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry.
In 1985 she obtained one of the first Mental Health Foundation GP Research Training Fellowships through which she completed a PhD on emotional disorders associated with childbirth in a cohort of women in South London, supervised by Professors Michael Shepherd and David Morrell. This cohort was subsequently followed up until the children were 25 years old. During her 11 years in South London, she was a partner (the first woman) at the Lambeth Road Group Practice - the academic practice attached to St Thomas' Hospital. She developed additional research interests in women's health in particular breast cancer screening and more generic interests in primary care mental health.
She took up the foundation chair in Primary Health Care in Bristol in 1994, the first woman to be appointed to a substantive chair in medicine in Bristol and built up a world-class department over the next sixteen years.
One of her greatest successes has been developing a cohort of young academic GPs and seeing them flourish. She took the Centre for Academic Primary Care into the NIHR School for Primary Care where it has continued to prosecute internationally recognised research. Read the full press release from the Centre for Academic Primary Care.
Read the full Birthday Honours list