DrAna Belen Espinosa Gonzalez

Dr Ana Espinosa is a General Practitioner and the Research Associate/Research Manager for the WNL ICB – SPH Research Partnership for Health Equity, a pioneering research collaboration between the NHS West and North London Integrated Care Board and Imperial College School of Public Health to address health inequalities through evidence-based policies and decisions. Established in 2023, the partnership was conceived as a key component of the ICB Population Health Management approach to promote evidence-based, data-driven decision-making across the system. 

In this role, Ana closely works with a variety of stakeholders in the West and North London Integrated Care System, including local authorities, providers, VCSE sector, ICB and academia to identify research priorities, facilitate the coproduction of research initiatives that target priority gaps and support the dissemination of findings to inform policy and commissioning decisions.

She combines her Imperial / ICB role with clinical duties as salaried general practitioner two days per week in a local NHS GP surgery in White City and her voluntary role in W12Together, a local VCSE partner, on a number of projects. She was also a member of the Health Equity Fellowship 25/26 cohort, alongside a group of front-line providers, grassroots and local authority representatives, to build the skills and address inequalities in their areas.

Thanks to her varied portfolio, she has an exceptional role in fomenting Knowledge Translation and Evidence Implementation across the WNL ICS, acts as Boundary-Spanner and Strategic Connector facilitating medication and alignment of initiatives across sectors and helping mobilise resources to address health inequalities in West and North London populations.

Her broader research interests include comparative health systems and policy research and health service research, particularly on aspects affecting providers' behaviour, primary care delivery and their impact on health equity and efficiency. Before joining the SPH in September 2023, she was based in the Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London, working in the comparative assessment of long COVID care pathways in the NHS (LOCOMOTION project) and the risk-stratification process for COVID-19 patients (RECAP project). 

She has also taken part in international collaborations. She worked as consultant for the OECD in the assessment of long COVID care pathways in the OECD countries in 2022. In 2023, she also joined the WHO European Centre for Primary Health Care in a mission commissioned by the Spanish Ministry of Health to assess the latest reforms in the Spanish primary care service and produce a set of policy recommendations for its improvement. 

Her PhD (Centre for Health Policy, Imperial College London) involved comparative assessment of the impact of primary care governance (mainly through financing and regulation) on providers' behaviour, service organisation and health care outcomes in 24 WHO European Region countries. For her MSc in Global Health (Trinity College Dublin), she assessed the implementation of primary care reforms in Turkey.