Staff Profile

Dr Amber Sacre is a mixed-methods population health researcher specialising in health inequalities, healthcare access and applied health-services research. She is currently a Research Associate in the NIHR Newcastle Patient Safety Research Collaboration, based in the School of Pharmacy at Newcastle University.

Amber completed her PhD in Population Health Sciences at Newcastle University in 2025, passing with no corrections. Her doctoral research investigated socioeconomic inequalities in childhood vaccination uptake in England, including how inequalities changed following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before joining the Patient Safety Research Collaboration, Amber worked as a Research Assistant in Newcastle University’s Population Health Sciences Institute and as a doctoral researcher within the Health Inequalities Team. She is also involved with the North East and North Cumbria Deep End Network.

She previously completed an MSc in Social Science Research (Sociology) with Distinction and a first-class BA in Sociology with Quantitative Methods at the University of Nottingham.

ORCID ID: 0009-0005-1459-1782

Research Overview

Amber’s research examines how social, economic and geographical inequalities influence people’s access to healthcare, their experiences of services and their health outcomes. Her work is particularly concerned with whether changes to the organisation and delivery of healthcare reduce existing inequalities or risk widening them.

Her doctoral research combined evidence synthesis, analysis of national vaccination data and qualitative research. This included a global umbrella review of socioeconomic inequalities in routine vaccination uptake, a longitudinal analysis of regional and socioeconomic inequalities in childhood vaccination uptake before and after the first COVID-19 lockdown, and interviews exploring how childhood immunisation services could better support underserved communities. This work contributed to the development of a proposed “Deep End” childhood immunisation intervention.

Amber’s current research focuses on the NHS 10-Year Health Plan and the movement of healthcare from hospital into community settings. She leads research examining whether delivering care closer to home improves access for disadvantaged communities or creates new barriers. She is the project lead for REACHED — Researching Equity and Access in Community-based Healthcare for Diagnostics — a mixed-methods evaluation of Community Diagnostic Centres in the North East and North Cumbria. The study compares community and hospital-based diagnostic pathways using routinely collected NHS appointment data alongside interviews with patients, carers and healthcare professionals. It examines inequalities in access, attendance and patient experience across diagnostic services.

Amber also leads European policy research on delayed access to healthcare and has contributed to research on digital exclusion and assistive technology in dementia, mental health, deindustrialisation and deaths of despair.

Research Expertise

Amber has expertise in both quantitative and qualitative research. Her quantitative experience includes analysing large national and routinely collected healthcare datasets using R. She has applied descriptive and inferential statistics, longitudinal and time-trend analysis, spline regression, panel-data methods, and multilevel modelling.

Her qualitative experience includes designing and conducting interviews and focus groups, developing topic guides and analysing data using thematic and framework analysis. She is also experienced in systematic, scoping and umbrella reviews.

Across her research, Amber works closely with NHS organisations, public health teams, healthcare professionals, policymakers and members of the public. She has experience leading projects from protocol development and research governance through to data collection, analysis and dissemination, as well as supporting students and junior researchers.

Supervision

• Primary supervisor, summer research intern, Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University
• Co-supervisor, MPharm dissertation (2022-2023), School of Pharmacy, Newcastle University
• Co-supervisor, MPharm dissertation (2021-2022), School of Pharmacy, Newcastle University

Teaching

• Psychology Demonstrator (2022-2023), School of Psychology, Newcastle University