Dr Marion McAllister
Marion McAllister works within the Valuation and Evaluation of Genetic Counselling research theme at Nowgen.
She has an Honours degree in Genetics from Trinity College Dublin (1985) and an MSc in Biotechnology (1989). She then worked as a management consultant in the London office of Andersen Consulting for four years, leaving in 1994 to complete the MSc in Genetic Counselling at Manchester. She followed that with a PhD in Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University, investigating psychosocial aspects of predictive genetic testing for a hereditary cancer syndrome, completed in 1999. Marion has published this and other research in peer-reviewed clinical genetics and health psychology journals. Since then, she has worked as genetic counsellor at the North West Regional Clinical Genetics Department at St Mary’s Hospital in Manchester.
Marion joined Nowgen in 2003. In addition to her research at Nowgen, she has retained her clinical position and is an Honorary Lecturer for the MSc in Genetic Counselling at The University of Manchester, where she teaches the Research Skills module of the MSc course and supervises some of the MSc research projects. Marion has led on the qualitative arm of the Nowgen research programme, involving focus groups and interviews with patients of clinical genetics services, patient group representatives, and clinicians. This has led to development of a grounded theory model of ‘empowerment’ summarising the patient benefits from using clinical genetics services. Marion has also contributed to a systematic review of outcome measures used to evaluate clinical genetics services, and a Delphi survey to explore genetics professionals and patients’ views about which outcome domains are most appropiate to measure the patient benefits of using clinical genetics services.
In March 2007, Marion was awarded an MRC postdoctoral training fellowship in Health Services Research to commence in September 2007 at Nowgen. As part of this fellowship, Marion will operationalise the concept of ‘empowerment’ by developing a psychometrically validated questionnaire for use as an outcome measure for clinical genetics services.
