Miss Elizabeth Burns
School of Health & Society
Current positions
Senior Lecturer
Biography
Liz joined the University of Salford as a Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing in December 2015 and was appointed to the role of Student Voice & Communities Lead in our Directorate of Nursing & Midwifery in December 2022.
After registering as a mental health nurse in 1998 and graduating with a specialist practitioner qualification in community mental health nursing in 1999, Liz worked in alcohol services across a range of primary care and criminal justice settings. Prior to joining the University of Salford in 2015, she gained ten years’ experience as a public health practitioner, focusing on population approaches to reducing alcohol harm and individual behaviour change interventions.
Between 2017 and 2022, Liz was a Co-Investigator on the NIHR-funded alcohol health champions research project "Communities in Charge of Alcohol - CICA". The final NIHR report for this mixed-methods evaluation of a natural experiment was published in September 2024. More recently she completed a local authority commissioned evaluation of Safer Streets activity, funded by the Home Office. The research focused on whether a bottom-up approach, involving the community to co-design solutions and co-evaluate outcomes, is effective in creating safer communities. A post-implementation process-evaluation was carried out to inform future Home Office funded Safer Streets projects.
Areas of Research
Public health, asset based community development, brief interventions, motivational interviewing, behaviour change, alcohol harm reduction, alcohol licensing
Liz is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Qualifications
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Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice
2017 - 2017 -
MSc International Addiction Studies
2011 - 2013 -
BNurs (Hons) Mental Health Nursing (Specialist Practitioner Community Mental Health Nursing)
1995 - 1999
Publications
- An ‘alcohol health champions’ intervention to reduce alcohol harm in local communities: a mixed-methods evaluation of a natural experiment
- ‘A priori’ external contextual factors and relationships with process indicators: a mixed methods study of the pre-implementation phase of ‘Communities in Charge of Alcohol’
- How can communities influence alcohol licensing at a local level? Licensing Officers’ perspectives of the barriers and facilitators to sustaining engagement in a volunteer-led alcohol harm reduction approach
- Mental Health : a non-specialist introduction for nursing and health care