Bio: Nicholas Steel is a 2002-03 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy, based at RAND Health in Santa Monica. He is conducting research into the development of technical and patient-centered measures of the quality of health care, for use in national and international population surveys. Immediately prior to his Harkness Fellowship, Steel was an honorary fellow in Cambridge University's Department of Public Health and Primary Care and a specialist registrar in public health medicine. He was a clinical governance reviewer for the Commission for Health Improvement and a member of the British Medical Association's Committee for Public Health Medicine and Community Health for England. Previously, he was a practicing family physician and held a National Health Service research fellowship. Steel has experience of different health care systems, having worked as a physician in primary and secondary care in England, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand. He is also a member of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians, where he served as a faculty training accreditation visitor. He was awarded a 1999 Tripos Prize for public health from Trinity College, Cambridge University.
Placement: RAND Corporation
Mentors: Paul Shekelle, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H.; Elizabeth McGlynn, Ph.D.
Project: The Development of Population Survey Measures of Technical and Patient-Centered Quality of Health Care for Major Disabling Conditions
Description: The immediate objective of Steel's project was to develop a module or set of population survey questions about health care quality for several disabling conditions, to be used in population-based interview surveys (e.g., English Longitudinal Study of Aging, U.S. Health and Retirement Survey). She developed a set of quality indicators through a formal Delphi group, and validated these through field pilots.