Dr Kathryn McEwan

Assistant Professor

School: Communities and Education

Kathryn McEwan is an Assistant Professor in Community Wellbeing. Her research explores end-of-life care, death literacy, and support for caregivers, with a particular interest in how experiences of dying and bereavement are shaped by social class, service structures, and cultural narratives.

Her recent publications draw on realist evaluation, participatory action research, and grounded theory, including studies of home-based palliative and end-of-life care and Parkinson’s specialist nursing. Her current work centres on the Better Conversations project, which explores how compassionate, confident dialogue about death, dying, and bereavement can be embedded in health and social care education and practice. Through this, she aims to enhance graduate attributes such as emotional intelligence, reflexivity, and person-centred communication, qualities essential for future practitioners in complex care environments.

Kathryn teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, with a particular focus on compassionate and inclusive practice. She is committed to applied, collaborative research that improves real-world outcomes for people navigating complex care systems and informs the education of the future health and social care workforce.

She also co-founded and serves as a convenor for the British Sociological Association’s Mid-Career Forum, supporting community-building, knowledge-sharing, and career development for mid-career sociologists.

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Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Co-Producing Personalised Discharge Planning: Developing a Toolkit to Improve Caregiver Involvement in Hospital Transitions, McEwan, K., Sanders, T., Carr, S., Van der Graaf, P., Jones, S., Aquino, M., Hogg, M., Hameed, R., Lai, F., Cooper, C., Potthoff, S. 1 Dec 2025, In: Health Expectations : an International Journal of Public Participation in Health Care and Health Policy
‘People ring because they’re frightened’: findings from a realist evaluation on the impact of timely responsive care at home at the end of life, McEwan, K., Atkinson, J., Clarke, A., Bate, A., Jeffery, C., Dalkin, S. 14 Jul 2025, In: BMC Palliative Care
‘For Want of a Nail’: developing a transparent approach to retroduction and early initial programme theory development in a realist evaluation of community end of life care services, McEwan, K., Girling, M., Bate, A., Atkinson, J., Clarke, A., Dalkin, S. 3 Jul 2024, In: International Journal of Social Research Methodology
Providing ‘professionalism with compassion’; how the time for caring communication can improve experiences at the end-of-life at home, findings from a realist evaluation, McEwan, K., Atkinson, J., Clarke, A., Bate, A., Jeffery, C., Dalkin, S. 21 Dec 2024, In: BMC Palliative Care
The impact and value of the Parkinson’s nurse specialist to people with Parkinson’s and their care partners: a grounded theory qualitative study, McEwan, K., Clarke, A., Dalkin, S., Hand, A. 28 Oct 2024, In: BMC Nursing
Drinking Carling Out of Stella Glasses: People and Place in the Missing Middle, McEwan, K. 20 Jan 2021, In: Frontiers in Sociology
Precarious class positions in Spam City: youth, place and class in the ‘missing middle’, McEwan, K. 21 Aug 2019, Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging, Abingdon, Taylor & Francis