Dr Shalini Ahuja

Biography

Shalini Ahuja is a health services researcher and physiotherapist who is working as a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Implementation Science at the Health Services Population Research Department, King’s College London.

She is interested in using implementation research methods to explore the confluence of evidence-based interventions and how they are delivered throughout health and care systems, in order to support evidence-based policies that can effectively improve global health.

Currently, she works for the NIHR ARC National Priorities Programme on Mental Health including children and young people’s mental health (https://www.arc-sl.nihr.ac.uk/research-and-implementation/our-research-areas/mental-health-implementation-network). She works towards catalysing and evaluating the co-produced implementation of high impact, evidence-based mental health interventions, at key stages of the life course, supra-regionally within the National Health Services.

Prior to this, Ahuja was working with NIHR Health Protection Research Unit at Imperial College London for ASPIRES project. Here, she supported the development and evaluation of context specific behavioural, structural and technological interventions aiming at optimising antibiotic usage across the surgical pathway in England, India, Rwanda and South Africa.

Ahuja also worked for Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) in Emerging Mental Health Systems in Low and Middle Income countries (EMERALD) and Programme for Improving Mental Health Care (PRIME) projects. Here, she worked towards integrating mental health at primary levels by strengthening mental health information systems.

She holds an PhD in Health Services Research from King’s College London and a master’s degree in Health Management, Planning and Policy from University of Leeds.

Research Interests

• Implementation science in global health context
• Integrated Mental and Physical Health Care
• Adoption of virtual health care
• Mixed Methods Research
• Health Management Information Systems 

Teaching

Dr Ahuja has previously taught in an MSc module on scaling up mental health interventions and contributed to teachings on implementation science in global health, health system strengthening and service user involvement in research. She currently supervises research assistants working towards prioritising mental health interventions for the ARC priority network.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Dr Ahuja presented her PhD findings in October 2017 at the House of Parliament, Westminster, was invited to commission research led by WHO Kobe Centre and Save The Children and has written newspaper article and blogs for the One World South Asia and the Indian Express on the stigmatisation of mental health in the Indian sub-continent.