Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown
Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown is a Common Room Member at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.
Sarah writes
I qualified as a doctor in 1974 after three years at Lady Margaret Hall and three at the Westminster Hospital in London. I spent most of my working life in public health both in the NHS, when public health was provided from within the NHS, and then in the academic world.
I became a Common Room Member whilst working in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, running the Health Services Research Unit. It was there that I started to develop the discipline of Public Mental Health, building a portfolio of research which showed the effectiveness of prevention and promotion throughout the life course.
I moved from Oxford to take up a Chair in Public Health at the new medical school at the University of Warwick in 2003. Curious about the close relationship between wellbeing and health, I pursued and tested many different approaches to wellbeing for myself, first in managing my breast cancer and now, as I get older, in managing other health issues.
Along the way I have trained to practice and teach bodywork, embodiment, and coaching. Learning to sing and loving the collegeβs community choir has been part of that. I am also able to bring this knowledge to the GTC working group discussing the core determinates of health. At Warwick, I developed teaching on wellbeing for medical, MPH and other students. My research there included the development of a measure capable of quantifying mental wellbeing (the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale or WEMWBS) that has proved hugely popular with practitioners and researchers.
I retired from Warwick in 2020 and now offer consultancy services alongside supporting my two children and five grandchildren. I also run workshops on wellbeing and offer coaching on a one-to-one basis. I will be offering Wellbeing Day workshops at GTC from Nov 2024.
