Dr Helen Abnett

I am a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Public Health and Community Care (CRIPACC) in the School of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences (HML) at the Unversity of Hertfordshire (UH). Before joining UH, I worked with the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) at the University of Birmingham, and prior to that completed my PhD at the Centre for Philanthropy, University of Kent. My research interests grow from my prior 15-year career as a fundraiser, programme development specialist, and senior leader within the charity sector. 

My research interests centre on understanding and improving the quality of public service delivery, particularly health and social care service provision. Specifically, I seek to both understand and problematise how voluntary sector organisations are engaged in the delivery of such services. This includes considering questions around how such organisations are funded; where the border is, or should be, between state and charity delivery of services; where responsibility lies for addressing inequalities in access to services; and considering how charities’ representational activities construct and reflect a particular discourse around the role of the voluntary sector in public service delivery.

I co-lead the Hertfordshire Young People's Research Advisory Group (the Herts YPAG). The purpose of the group - as the YPAG members themselves define - is to ‘learn about research and work with researchers to help them to plan and do research about children and young people’s health, care, family lives and the communities we live in’. The group provide support to researchers across the research process, including designing research, developing materials, analysis, reporting and dissemination. They primarily provide input for researchers at the University of Hertfordshire (UH) and the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) East of England, as well as researchers and policymakers from other academic institutions and voluntary sector or government organisations.