Dr Hanhua Liu 

I am a research associate based in the Biostatistics Group, Health Sciences Research Group at The University of Manchester.

My primary research interests include health policy; health inequalities; provider behaviour; clinical autonomy; and delivery of cost effective and efficient health care. I also have an interest in the application of the mixture of quantitative and qualitative methodologies in applied research.

My PhD study aimed to investigate the possibility of reducing healthcare costs through encouraging doctors to change their potentially costly prescribing practice in China using prescription feedback, i.e. providing doctors with information on their own past prescribing profiles and comparisons with those of their peers. The study was an intervention design - adopting the English PACT (prescribing analysis and cost) report as the intervention and tested it in the Chinese setting to find out if it would promote doctors' willingness to exercise self-control of their prescribing practice. I conducted fieldwork in China’s public hospitals - access was approved of by China’s Ministry of Health. The findings indicated that the prescription feedback reports had the effect of encouraging sample doctors to review their own prescribing practice. They were interpreted with reference to notions of clinical autonomy and Foucault's theory of `surveillance' and `the problematisation of the normal'.

I am currently working on an MRC Methodology Grant project.

In years 2006-9, I involved in a number of projects including:
The ESRC Rediscovering the Civic Project which was an integrated programme of research activities designed to address the question: How do we engage the citizens in the making of policies and in how those policies are delivered? In joint work with professors Peter John and Ed Fieldhouse, we examined the Home Office Citizenship Survey 2005 with over 10,000 respondents to test out our proposed model of civic behaviour - aiming to understand the causal links between civic behaviour and orientations/dispositions. I also took a quantitative role in one of the project's RCTs linked to the policy side of implementing new measures of citizen involvement and neighbourhood decision-making.

A ‘Design Experiment' which was a collaborative research project working with Wigan Borough Council to evaluate a policy to reduce drugs use and improve the quality of life of users on the Trees Estate. Led by Professor Peter John, the project tested the Design Experiment Methodology and explored how evidence from drugs intervention challenged the theories of change which may be re-evaluated at different time points throughout the evaluation process.

The Manchester-Harvard Civic Engagement Project which emerged from the joint interest in Harvard and Manchester in civic engagement. By using comparable survey evidence, this project aimed to compare the profiles, causes and consequences of civic orientation and behaviour in Britain and the US. Professor Peter John led the Manchester team whilst Professor Robert Putnam led the Harvard team.

The Policy Priorities of UK Governments Project (funded by the British Academy) which was part of the Comparative Agendas Project directed by Professor Frank Baumgartner. Professor Peter John was the Principal Investigator for the UK project. On this project we coded the content of the policy intentions of UK governments, as expressed in Queen's and King's speeches, according to the policy agendas code frame created by Professor Baumgartner and colleagues. We created an annual data set of Queen's and King's speeches reaching back from 2005 to 1940 (dataset deposited with the UK Data Archive).

I have reviewed papers for Social Science and Medicine.

I was awarded my first degree in Business Administration by The University of Hertfordshire in 2000. I obtained my PhD in Social Policy (Health Policy) under the supervision of Dr Sarah Nettleton from The University of York in 2005. My thesis is titled “Investigating the possibility of changing doctors' prescribing in China: What does an intervention study tell us?” (England: The University of York Library).

Before joining the staff of the Biostatistics Group, I held a research post in The University of Manchester School of Social Sciences between January 2006 and December 2009.

BA Hons (2000) Business Administration, The University of Hertfordshire
PhD (2005) Social Policy (Health Policy), The University of York

Biostatistics:
Professor Graham Dunn – Professor of Biomedical statistics
Dr Richard Emsley – Research Fellow in Biostatistics

Health Care in China:
Professor Xiaomei Pei – Executive Director of the Gerontology Research Centre at Tsinghua University, Mainland China