Nicola grew up in London, UK, and then spent her University years at the University of Warwick. She developed an early interest in sociology and social policy in the health field. After completing her Masters, she secured an ESRC doctoral fellowship to complete her PhD at Warwick on the training of complementary and alternative medical practitioners. The thesis, entitled ‘Knowing the body and embodying knowledge’ contributed to the fields of embodied sociology, the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of health and healthcare.

She moved back to London, and worked at the University of Westminster, teaching Public Health and taking up a Research Fellow position in the iCAM Unit (integrating complementary and alternative medicine), where she worked on a number of projects related to clinical governance and safety in CAM practice. During this time, she also held a Visiting Lecturer position at Birkbeck, University of London, where she taught Health Policy and Public Health. In 2009, she moved back to the Midlands, to take up a Research Fellow position at the School of Health and Population Sciences at the University of Birmingham, working for the NIHR Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLARHC) for Birmingham and the Black Country. She was the lead for the qualitative workstreams in four of the CLAHRC themes. At Birmingham, she set up CAMBRA - the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Birmingham Research Alliance, which has members from across the University, local NHS Trust and Third Sector organisations.

In January 2013, she moved to the Health Services Management Centre in the School of Social Policy, where is now Professor of Health Policy and Sociology. In addition to her research interests (see below), she has been leading work developing the University’s inclusive education and postgraduate research activity for a number of years. She has held the roles of Director of Postgraduate Research and Deputy Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange (Impact and Engagement) for the College of Social Sciences.

She was previously the Head of the School of Social Policy and Society.  

Professor Gale’s core substantive research interest is health care practice and the everyday work of professionals, para-professionals, complementary and lay healthcare workers, particularly those working in community and primary care settings. She applies her social science approach to a range of health fields, including respiratory medicine and antibiotic use/antimicrobial resistance. She is currently the Co-Director of the interdisciplinary group Confronting Antimicrobial Resistance (iCARE).

Theoretically, her work cuts across the sociology of health and illness, embodied sociology, the sociology of work and professions, and health policy and implementation.  Her contribution in these fields has been to explicate the different kinds of ‘work’ involved in forms of healthcare and the implications of this for the wider health system and health policy.  She has drawn on and developed post-phenomenological scholarship that seeks to attach sense-making processes to power, embodiment and/or socio-cultural structures.  For example, her explorations of ‘body work’ (work that involves direct interaction with the bodies of others) has revealed issues about the knowledge base of practices (i.e. largely embodied knowledge) and their value in the system, the professional identity and aspiration of practitioners, as well as the power relationships and working conditions that result from this. She has a longstanding collaboration with Dr Patrick Brown (University of Amsterdam) to explore and research the concept of ‘risk work’. They have edited a special edition of Health, Risk and Society on this topic.

A secondary but significant interest has been patient experience, particularly self-management of long term conditions and survivorship, and public involvement in health care, with specific reference to working with seldom-heard groups.  She has a particular interest in the use and practice of traditional, complementary and alternative medicines.  

Methodologically, she specialises in place-based and embodied empirical methods such as ethnography, shadowing, and auto-ethnography. She coined the term ‘situated interviewing’ to describe a method of interviewing that drew on these principles but was also feasible within applied health research projects. She also has a particular interest in the use of methods, such as Framework and qualitative meta-synthesis, that she argues have greater potential to inform policy and clinical practice. Her work has included contributions to evidence synthesis and health technology assessments, particularly where alternative approaches to assess attribution are required because (R)CT evidence is not available.

Her research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research, the Wellcome Trust, the Health Foundation, Public Health England, the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness, Universitas 21 and Cancer Research UK.