Pippa is Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education. She initially  studied psychology at Leeds University, before researching first speech dysfluency and then medical accidents in the Department of Psychology, UCL. She worked with Prof Charles Vincent at the Clinical Risk Unit for North Thames Region and later developed training programmes for healthcare staff in risk management. These training programmes became the foundation for the risk management postgraduate programme which was established at CHIME, UCL in 1998 and has now fed into the informatics programme.

Her past research work focussed on the psychological issues in patient safety and included topics such as patients' and clinicians' attitudes to complaints, the clinician's need for support in litigation, the causes and consequences of junior doctors' mistakes and obstetrics cases analysis.

In addition to her teaching and research work, she was a lay assessor for the General Chiropractic Council.