Professor Aoife M. McDermott is Professor of Human Resource Management at Aston Business School. Her research responds to the global healthcare workforce crisis, examining how system-level constraints, organisational practices, and management roles shape workforce retention and wellbeing. She bridges macro and micro perspectives through international comparative research with direct policy relevance.

International Appointments

Professor McDermott holds affiliate faculty status at UC Berkeley’s Center for Healthcare Organizational and Innovation Research (CHAMP) and at UCSF's Healthforce Center and Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. She was a 2022–23 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice at UC Berkeley, jointly funded by NIHR, the Health Foundation, and the Commonwealth Fund, with her fellowship project focusing on staff retention in primary care. She also holds an Adjunct Professorship at the Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing at Griffith University, Australia.

Career

Prior to joining Aston University in January 2024, Professor McDermott was Professor of Human Resource Management at Cardiff University, where she coordinated the Cardiff Health Organisation and Policy Studies (CHOPS) research group and served as founding Programme Director of the MSc/Diploma in Healthcare Planning, commissioned by the Welsh Government and NHS Wales to build a talent pipeline in this field.

Educated at Trinity College Dublin, she was a Trinity Scholar, awarded a gold medal, and completed her PhD as a Government of Ireland Research Scholar. She subsequently held a lectureship at Dublin City University before joining Cardiff Business School.

Research and Publications

Her research examines employment relationships and retention in health and social care, with particular interests in work design, skill mix change, line management and HR roles, moral injury and burnout, peer support worker integration, and the organisational implications of AI adoption in health systems. Findings have been published in leading international journals including the Human Resource Management Journal, Human Resource Management, the International Journal of Human Resource Management, the British Journal of Management, Public Administration, and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.

Recent work, co-authored with Graeme Currie (University of Warwick) and Hector P. Rodriguez (UC Berkeley) and published in the Human Resource Management Journal in March 2026, is titled "Why HR Has Failed to Address Healthcare's Workforce Crisis: The Need for a Systems Partner Role". A further recent article, co-authored with Ian Kessler (Kings College London) and colleagues and published in Human Resource Management, addresses sustainable work and employment in social care.

She served as lead editor of the Research Handbook on Contemporary Human Resource Management for Health Care (Edward Elgar, 2024), co-edited with Paula Hyde (University of Birmingham), Ariel C. Avgar (Cornell University) and Louise FitzGerald (De Montfort University) — a field-defining volume bringing together leading international scholars on contemporary trends in HRM and health care.

Knowledge Exchange and Professional Leadership

In November 2019, Professor McDermott delivered the Fourth Rosemary Stewart Memorial Lecture at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, jointly with Professor Louise FitzGerald. Titled "Better work for better care? Building a sustainable healthcare system", the lecture drew on national and international research to address NHS workforce vacancies, changing clinical roles, and strategies for sustainable healthcare employment.

She was previously a Trustee of SHOC — the Society for Studies in Organizing Healthcare — and held executive roles within the society, including organising its biannual International Organisational Behaviour in Healthcare (OBHC) Conference and editing associated book and special issue collections.

Honours and Recognition

Professor McDermott is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an Academic Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). Her research has attracted over £1.5 million in competitive funding from national and international funders across

• Fellow, Academy of Social Sciences
• Academic Fellow, CIPD
• Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy and Practice (2022-23), jointly funded by NIHR, Health Foundation, and Commonwealth Fund
• Teaching Awards: Two awards and five nominations
• Government of Ireland Research Scholar (PhD)
• Gold Medal, BA (mod) Business & Sociology, Trinity College Dublin
• Trinity Scholar (Trinity College Dublin).

• Healthcare workforce retention and reform
• System-level and organizational constraints on HRM effectiveness
• Management roles (line managers, HR function, hybrid roles)
• Work design, job quality, and employee wellbeing
• HRM innovation and change implementation
• International comparative health systems research

Current research

• System-level constraints on healthcare workforce reform (US-UK comparison)
• Peer support worker roles and behavioural health service innovation
• Primary care physician work experiences and retention
• Healthcare worker wellbeing 
• Flexibility i-deals for healthcare staff

Recent competitive funding

• Commonwealth Fund & NIHR (Harkness Fellowship)
• Health Research Board (Ireland)
• Irish Research Council
• National Leadership and Innovation Agency for Wales