Anna Verey is a PhD student and Research Associate at the King’s Centre for Military Health Research (KCMHR), King’s College London. Anna’s PhD investigates combat injury-related challenges to sexual intimacy and is known as the ADVANCE-CIRCUIT study; it is funded by The Colt Foundation. The ADVANCE-CIRCUIT study has one overarching aim: that individuals who sustain occupational injuries which lead to the development of sexual dysfunction are enabled to live the most fulfilling lives possible.

Since joining KCMHR in 2014, Anna has worked on the ‘Armed Services Trauma Rehabilitation Outcome Study’ (ADVANCE), where she led the qualitative component of ADVANCE-INVEST, a five-year project which examined the transition outcomes for battlefield casualties. She has helped to deliver two further projects: ‘Support to Families of Wounded, Injured, or Sick Service Personnel – An Investigation of Current Service Provision and Potential Gaps’ and the ‘Service Parents’ and Adolescents’ Challenges and Experiences Study’. Previously, she was employed at the School of Health Sciences, City University and managed the East London site of a Randomised Controlled Trial, assessing the impact of peer support for those discharged from acute inpatient mental health units. She also worked at UCL in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health on a feasibility study concerning oral health of older adults in care homes.

Anna is passionate about involving people and communities in research; reflexive practice; using creativity within the research pathway; and having real impact. She holds a BA in Fashion and Textile Design, a BSc in Psychology, a MSc in Social Psychology and a diploma in Counselling Using the Arts.

Research Interests

• Post-deployment transition
• Wounded, injured and sick Service personnel
• Veterans and their families
• Serving/ex-serving fathers with post-traumatic stress disorder and their families
• Creative methods
• Peer support and co-production  

Expertise & Public Engagement

Anna helped to publish Real Stories, an online gallery of images submitted by military-connected families reflecting family life.  She chairs the ADVANCE Study Participant Panel, which meets bi-annually to offer advice on how to maintain high levels of engagement with participants during this 20-year study of the long-term physical and psycho-social outcomes of battlefield casualties in the U.K.  Outside of her work at King’s College London, Anna trains as a Counsellor Using the Arts (Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education) and volunteers with third sector organisations such as St. Vincent’s Family Project, Westminster and Combat Stress, offering therapeutic sessions to their client base.