Biography

Wendy Gnich took up post as a research fellow and evaluation team manager for Childsmile the national oral health improvement programme in Scotland in July 2008. Wendy has a disciplinary background in psychology and a PhD in applied social science. She was employed by the Research Unit in Health, Behaviour and Change (RUHBC) at the University of Edinburgh (from 1998 to 2008) and was a key member of the unit’s evaluation programme.

Wendy has made a major contribution to a number of large-scale national evaluations of health-improvement initiatives. These have included a quasi-experimental evaluation of a community-based anti-smoking initiative (Breathing Space) in a low income area and the external evaluation of ASH and NHS Health Scotland’s national young people‘s smoking cessation pilot programme.

More recently Wendy acted as consultant and evaluator on the evaluation of the second phase of the national health demonstration project ‘Have a Heart Paisley’. She has a particular interest in the evaluation of complex health promotion initiatives (both methodological and theoretical issues), mixed method approaches to evaluation, the role of health services in reducing health inequalities and anticipatory care.