Dr Rose Rickford

Profile

I am a sociologist of health and medicine and a qualitative health services researcher. My primary research interest is in the relationship between how organisations and services are organised, and how they are experienced by the people who use them and work in them – particularly in relation to health inequalities.

Since 2024 I have been a postdoctoral research fellow on the NIHR funded PAPER Study – Prescribing Antidepressants in Primary care: Ethnic inequalities in tReatment, where I am conducting qualitative research into diagnosis and treatment of depression for South Asian patients in UK primary care.

I completed my PhD in 2023 at the Department of Sociology, University of York, looking at the response of grassroots community organisations to the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside my PhD, I worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Huddersfield, exploring women’s experiences of and attitudes to cervical screening in the NHS. From 2023-2024 I held a postdoctoral research associate role at the University of Oxford, investigating the experiences of women’s manual skills education in 20th century Britain.

I have taught research methods and social theory to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and supervised undergraduate and postgraduate research, including a PsychD doctorate to completion. I specialise in teaching ontology and epistemology in an accessible way, particularly to clinical students and trainees.

I am an Associate Fellow of Advance HE. I am an associate of Public World, a social enterprise specialising in workplace organisation in health and social care.

Research

Research Interests:

I am interested in the everyday organisation of health and social care. My focus is on how health and social care organisations, particularly primary care and voluntary and community organisations, can be organised to maximise their ability to support people's wellbeing and tackle inequalities.

My current areas of research are the organisation of the diagnosis and treatment of depression in primary care and the organisation of cervical screening in primary care.

I am a qualitative methodologist, with particular interest in and experience of conversation analysis, in-depth interviewing, and comparative methods in qualitative research. I am also interested in relationships between research methodology and ontology/metaphysics.

Publications

Facilitating engagement: Individual meaning-making and relationship-based trust in women’s experiences of cervical screening https://doi.org/10.1177/13591053251400069

Understanding depression symptom heterogeneity in South Asian minority groups: systematic scoping review https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2026.10539

Attitudes to reducing cervical screening frequency among UK women: A qualitative analysis. https://doi.org/10.1002/pon.6117