Who we are

Ian is a consultant in anaesthesia and critical care at Dorset County Hospital and a critical care doctor with Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance. He co-founded DocBike after seeing the consequences of motorcycle collisions in his clinical work, combining care for injured riders with a commitment to preventing injuries.

As chair of MIPnet, Ian brings these clinical and community perspectives together. He helps connect researchers with riders, emergency services and organisations able to put findings into practice. His contribution keeps the network focused on questions that matter to people affected by motorcycle collisions, and on evidence that can help prevent bereavement, disability and the lasting disruption to family life.

Nina supports collaborative research programmes and networks at Wessex Health Partners. A registered nurse, she brings experience in intensive care and in setting up and delivering research across a range of hospital specialties. This gives her an understanding of both the clinical questions behind a study and the practical work needed to carry it out.

Within MIPnet, Nina helps contributors work together, maintains continuity between meetings and supports connections across the region’s healthcare and academic organisations. Her contribution helps turn shared ideas into coordinated work, making it easier for the network to draw on the right expertise and progress research with a clear purpose for patients and communities.

Sarah is Associate Director of Research across Dorset County Hospital and Dorset HealthCare, with a clinical background in critical care and research nursing. She helped establish MIPnet as co-lead alongside Ian Mew, bringing the NHS research experience and organisational support needed to develop the collaboration.

Sarah now provides governance on behalf of Dorset County Hospital as MIPnet’s sponsor. She helps the network develop clear research questions and workable proposals, with appropriate sponsorship, ethical review and oversight. This continuing contribution gives MIPnet a sound foundation for research that participants and partner organisations can trust, while helping promising ideas progress into studies capable of informing care and injury prevention.

David is an Anaesthesia Associate and Advanced Critical Care Practitioner at Dorset County Hospital, with a background in paramedic practice and HEMS. His work for MIPnet brings clinical understanding to the task of finding, preparing and interpreting information about motorcycle injuries across different services.

David undertakes a lot of the data analytical work of the epidemiology workstream, with support from Julie Mytton. By bringing together data from ambulance, hospital, police and rehabilitation areas, he is helping establish who is injured and what existing records can tell us about their collision and subsequent care. Identifying gaps and inconsistencies between datasets is an important part of this work: a more complete picture can help MIPnet direct prevention research towards the people and circumstances that would otherwise be overlooked. David is an example of an early career researcher that MIPnet is keen to support.

Richard is a Lecturer in Sustainable Transport at the University of Southampton. His background spans psychology and human factors: understanding how people interact with technology, their environment and the wider systems around them. His research includes transport behaviour and equitable access to transport.

Rich leads MIPnet’s behavioural interventions theme and brings experience of driving simulation to discussions about how prevention approaches could be tested. His perspective helps the network examine how riders and other road users make decisions in context. This can inform interventions that are practical and acceptable to riders, with careful evaluation of whether they change behaviour and offer a credible route to reducing injury. With Prof Rob Crouch, he supports David Thom’s research and is helping to develop the early career research framework for the network.

Chantal contributes through her work with the Wessex Secure Data Environment and the Pre-hospital Research and Audit Network, known as PRANA. These connected programmes support the secure use of information from different organisations to understand patients’ care pathways and outcomes.

Within MIPnet, she helps the group understand how transport, emergency-service and healthcare information might be brought together, and the data-sharing arrangements and approvals needed to do so. Her contribution is important to investigating what happens beyond a collision record or hospital admission. Having an environment in which personal data is managed securely and in a well-governed environment is key to the MIPnet research while maintaining public confidence in how the information is used.

Mel is Professor of Social Work at Bournemouth University, where she leads the Public Involvement in Education and Research partnership and co-directs the Centre for Seldom Heard Voices. Her work centres on recognising lived experience as expertise and involving people whose voices are often missing from research.

Mel leads MIPnet’s work with under-represented groups and helps shape its patient and public involvement. She advocates working through trusted community partners and meeting people where they are. This approach helps riders and people affected by collisions influence the questions MIPnet asks and how studies are designed, so that future prevention approaches reflect a wider range of experiences and do not leave those at greatest risk behind.

Dermot is Associate Head of Bournemouth University Business School and an economist whose research includes healthcare policy and health technology assessment. He brings experience of economic modelling and the use of evidence to understand how healthcare resources can be used effectively.

Dermot leads MIPnet’s work on the burden of motorcycle collisions. The developing theme considers healthcare alongside longer-term consequences such as loss of earnings, unpaid care, demands on other public services, road closures and the effect on those who are caught up in a severe road collision, whether bystander or member of the emergency services. His contribution will help the network produce transparent estimates of these costs and examine the potential value of prevention, giving decision-makers a stronger basis for judging where investment could make a difference.

Phil is Head of Transport Safety at TRL, the Transport Research Laboratory. He has a background in injury biomechanics and specialist experience in motorcycle injury prevention, including work on the Department for Transport’s SHARP motorcycle helmet rating scheme. He also contributes to PRANA through its policy, practice and partnership work.

Phil brings a transport and engineering perspective to MIPnet’s clinical research, helping connect the network with relevant data owners and organisations that can act on the findings. His experience supports consideration of both collision prevention and protection from injury. These connections can help research inform practical decisions about protective equipment, transport policy and measures to reduce the consequences of motorcycle collisions.

Sukanya is an entrepreneurship researcher and educator at Bournemouth University Business School. Her research includes inclusive entrepreneurship, social enterprise and barriers to economic participation. She brings an interest in how people’s circumstances affect their ability to earn a living, make choices and participate in their communities.

In MIPnet, Sukanya contributes to understanding the wider societal harm associated with injury. Her perspective helps the network consider how a collision can affect a person’s independence and economic opportunities, including consequences that conventional healthcare costs may not capture. This adds depth to the burden research and can help make the case for prevention that protects livelihoods as well as health.

Julie is Professor of Public Health at UWE Bristol. Following clinical work in general practice and community paediatrics, she specialised in public health. Her research focuses on the patterns and causes of injury, and on developing evidence that can inform prevention practice and policy in the UK and internationally.

Julie leads MIPnet’s epidemiology theme and helps the group turn its ambitions into focused, answerable research questions. Her experience in injury research, study development and research capacity building is particularly relevant as the network develops its programme. She helps connect the analysis of motorcycle injuries with a population-health perspective, so that findings can inform prevention approaches with benefits beyond an individual service or locality.

Rob is a Consultant Nurse at University Hospital Southampton and Honorary Professor of Emergency Care at the University of Southampton. His clinical and research experience includes major trauma and clinical decision-making, and he contributes to PRANA as an emergency medicine adviser.

Rob leads MIPnet’s early career researchers strategy, helping to bring new and emerging academics into the injury prevention research world, linking potential academics with the network and supporting them to develop their career. Because of this background, Rob also brings an understanding of the care injured people need and how their journeys are recorded across services. Working alongside the economics team, he can connect questions about resource use and outcomes with the realities of emergency and trauma care. This contribution supports a more clinically meaningful account of the consequences of motorcycle injury and the opportunities for prevention.

Kim is a Senior Research Fellow in Paramedic Science at UWE Bristol, Lead Research Paramedic for Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance and part of the research team at South Western Ambulance Service. She brings more than twenty years of frontline paramedic experience and research interests in emergency call triage, prehospital care and improving patient pathways.

Kim contributes to MIPnet’s work on ambulance-service information and the development of research within the Ambulance Service. Her combination of clinical and research experience helps the group interpret what happens before a patient reaches hospital, including the resources involved and the limits of routine records. This supports a fuller understanding of motorcycle injury and helps ensure that the prehospital part of the patient journey informs the network’s research.

Shaun is a Regional Road Safety Manager with IAM RoadSmart. His work in advanced rider development brings a practical understanding of how people learn, build confidence and develop their riding skills. He contributes a connection between organised rider training and the communities MIPnet hopes its research will benefit.

Within the steering group, Shaun brings a rider-development perspective to discussions about public involvement and prevention. His experience can help the network consider whether proposed approaches make sense to riders and how research findings could be used in training. This practical contribution complements wider community involvement, helping MIPnet develop research that can translate into useful, accessible improvements in riding practice.

Shaun’s role as a motorcyclist with representation across the country is to keep the research team focused on the benefits to the average motorcyclist on the road, have a voice for what everyday motorcyclists would want to see, and make sure that outputs from the network are shared in a way that is understandable, clear and useful to the motorcycling community.