Nina MacKenzie

Dr Nina MacKenzie, a psychiatry registrar in the West of Scotland region, is a member of the 3^rd cohort of fellows on the Multimorbidity PhD Programme for Health Professionals supported by the Wellcome Trust. She will be working under the supervision of Professors Alexander Baldacchino, Frances Quirk and Peter Donnelly, and Dr Joe Tay at the University of St Andrews School of Medicine.

Nina graduated from the University of Edinburgh, obtaining an MBChB with honours in 2010, having previously worked in the NHS as a physiotherapist. She entered core psychiatry training in 2017, and during the 3^rd year of training she led a research project evaluating four-year outcomes after admission to a substance use rehabilitation programme. After completing core psychiatry training, Nina secured a one-year Scottish Clinical Leadership Fellowship with Scottish Government and NHS Education Scotland, working on several projects related to medical workforce planning and postgraduate medical training quality management. On entering general adult psychiatry higher training in 2023 Nina continued as co-chair of a Scottish Government working group on recruitment and retention of the psychiatry medical workforce. Nina’s research interests include mental health disorders (including substance use disorders), multiple long-term conditions, and inequalities.

Key research areas are:

To better understand how long-term health conditions relate to harmful alcohol use, how they interact to impact outcomes, and how they vary by demographic and clinical factors, including inequalities.

To understand the lived experience of people living with multiple long-term conditions and harmful alcohol use, including furthering knowledge of how harmful alcohol use impacts the management of long-term conditions, or how having multiple long-term conditions affects harmful alcohol use.

Exploring the hospital-based care experiences of individuals with MLTCs admitted with alcohol-related conditions, and their informal carers and healthcare professionals, including investigating the barriers and facilitators to accessing care for MLTCs and harmful alcohol use in this population.