Professor Rowan Harwood

Rowan Harwood is Professor of Palliative and End of Life Care at the University of Nottingham, and a consultant in geriatric and general internal medicine at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. He was previously honorary professor in geriatric medicine at the University of Nottingham.

He has wide clinical interests. Currently he works in acute geriatric medical care, with a special interest in patients with delirium, dementia, and combined physical and mental health problems. He runs a joint medical and mental health unit and supports a liaison old age psychiatry service. He spent 10 years as a consultant stroke physician, and has run clinical services in continence management, geriatric rehabilitation and orthogeriatrics.

Research interests include development and evaluation of complex interventions for older people, including health maintenance following a diagnosis of dementia, a model of person-centred acute care in cognitive disorders, clinical communication with patients with dementia, appropriate models of end-of-life care, delirium recovery and falls prevention. He uses methods including randomised controlled trials, cohorts, process and realist evaluation, and conversation analysis. He has also worked on psychometrics and clinical measurement, including developing 2 health outcome scales.

He was educated at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, holds a masters degree in epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a doctorate from Cambridge University. He held an MRC Health Services Research training fellowship under Prof Shah Ebrahim at the Royal Free Hospital Medical College, London.

He has written 5 books on stroke and dementia, contributed to leading textbooks including the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, and authored 200 academic papers. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Age and Ageing, the leading clinical geriatric medical journal with an impact factor of 10.7.