Sara is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Centre for Health Policy and Management, which is part of the Discipline of Public Health and Primary Care in the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin. She is also a co-Director of the national SPHeRE PhD programme http://www.sphereprogramme.ie. She is the Principal Investigator of a research project entitled ‘Health system foundations for Sláintecare implementation in 2020 and beyond – co-producing a Sláintecare Living Implementation Framework with Evaluation: Learning from the Irish health system’s response to COVID-19′. This is a HRB Applied Partnership Award which runs until 2024 thanks to successfully getting a HEA COVID-extension fund in 2021. This APA project started with its focus on the implementation of the regions but changed direction in 2020 in order to harness learnings from the COVID-19 health system response to inform the implementation.
Prof Burke leads the team reporting on Ireland for the European Observatory Health Systems COVID-19 response monitor. Previously, she coordinated ‘Mapping the pathways to universal healthcare’. In the first five months of 2017, Sara and a team from the Centre, led by Prof Steve Thomas worked with the Oireachtas Committee on the Future of Healthcare, who had a remit to develop a ten-year plan for healthcare reform in Ireland.
Sara has worked for more than 25 years as a researcher in and of health systems and policy. Her book entitled Irish Apartheid, Healthcare Inequality in Ireland was published in 2009. She writes occasionally for the national newspapers and for 7 years from 2008 to 2015 had a weekly health slot on RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme.