Senior Research Fellow

Gill Furze is Professor Cardiovascular Rehabilitation in the Centre for Technology Enabled Health Research (CTEHR) at Coventry University. She worked for many years in cardiac nursing and in medical rehabilitation in hospitals across the UK before moving into research in 1996. From 1997 Gill was senior member of the British Heart Foundation Research Group at the University of York. Gill has a psychology PhD and her research interests are around self-management in people with long term conditions (particularly heart disease) and the effect of peoples’ beliefs about illness on coping and outcome. Gill was co-author (with Bob Lewin) of the innovative “Angina Plan” home-based self-management and cardiac rehabilitation programme for people with stable angina. She supported the training of over 900 Angina Plan facilitators and the programme has been taken up by over 20,000 patients. In 2007 she received the award for Excellence and Innovation in Research or Education at the inaugural Cardiac Nursing Awards of the British Association of Nurses in Cardiac Care/British Journal of Cardiac Nursing. Gill is President of the British Association for Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation.

My research was inspired by my nursing practice in supporting people with heart disease to live as full a life as they can. This has led to two foci for my research: i) the effect of common cardiac misconceptions that prevent people from coping well with their condition, and how we address these, and ii) to develop and evaluate innovative rehabilitation and/or self-management programmes to improve outcomes for people living with heart disease and other long term conditions.