Tamara Mulherin is a PhD student supported by What Works Scotland.
About Tamara’s research
The broad emphasis of Tamara’s doctoral research is on understanding how managers who work across organisational boundaries, make sense of, adapt to, and practice collaboration in the context of Health and Social Care Integration in Scotland.
Tamara is doing her PhD in Politics and International Relations in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh.
More about Tamara
Tamara has more than 25 years experience and expertise in planning, delivery, management and evaluation of national, state, local policies and programmes in the public and non-government sectors in Australia, the United Kingdom and internationally.
She has a masters degree in Policy and Management and another in Public Administration. She is an alumnus of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government.
She was most recently Programme Manager for the implementation of Self-directed Support at the City of Edinburgh Council.
Tamara’s professional practice has been centred on working on complex social and health issues, including, homelessness, health inequalities, domestic violence, substance misuse, mental health issues and social care – all of which involved working informally and formally in a collaborative way.
She has also been involved in teaching and facilitating through to the design and delivery of various training programmes.
She is interested in complexity, evaluative thinking, ‘brain-friendly’ learning and facilitation, change management and organisational development. Her research interests have been influenced by her practice as an evaluator, in particular, contribution analysis, outcomes planning, program theory and realist evaluation.
However, given her professional history, her primary research interest lies in the area of partnership working (or inter-organisational collaboration) in the context of New Public Governance approaches to public management, especially the need to understand what purpose boundary-spanning might play.
