Rate My Professor Tracey Thornley

Professor Tracey Thornley serves as Honorary Professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy within the College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing at the University of Newcastle, Australia, a position appointed in May 2024. She holds the title of Professor of Health Policy in the Faculty of Science, School of Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham. A qualified pharmacist and health economist, she possesses MRPharmS registration and a BSc(Pharm), and completed her PhD at the University of Nottingham in 2006 with a thesis entitled 'Factors Affecting Service Delivery within Community Pharmacies'. Her academic and professional career emphasizes generating outcomes evidence to support community pharmacy services, informing pharmacy contract frameworks across UK markets, and quantifying the value of medicines management and optimisation to health and social care systems.

Thornley's research focuses on antimicrobial stewardship, collaborating with UK Health Security Agency and NHS England/Improvement on initiatives that have directly influenced clinical practice, including the use of TARGET materials for safety-netting advice with antibiotics. She was an elected member of the English Pharmacy Board of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society from 2016 to 2022, advocating for antimicrobial stewardship on expert advisory groups, and served on the global Executive Committee of the International Pharmaceutical Federation's Community Pharmacy section from 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she advised on national and local responses and was seconded to the UK Health Security Agency from January 2021 to April 2022 as Head of Research Innovations Partnerships Team and Head of Health Innovation and Policy Integration Team. Internationally, she has contributed to pharmacist vaccination regulations in France, mole screening in Norway, and pharmacogenomics in the Netherlands. She acts as a peer reviewer for journals, research funding, and NICE MedTech Innovation Briefings. Key publications include 'What proportion of prescription items dispensed in community pharmacies follow the prescribing doctor's recommendations?' (Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy, 2014), 'Relevance of Pharmacogenomics to the Safe Use of Antimicrobials' (2023), and contributions to antimicrobial stewardship and health policy reviews.