Serena's research aims to prevent and redress the health consequences of deep social exclusion, a discipline known as Inclusion Health.  Her work focuses on understanding the health needs of people with experiences of homelessness, substance use disorder, imprisonment, and sex work and developing practical, evidence-based solutions to addressing those needs. 

Her PhD research is funded by an NIHR Clinical Doctoral Research Fellowship. It is examining how hospitals can help to deliver preventative interventions to people experiencing homelessness. This is important because people experiencing homelessness often face barriers to accessing primary care and preventative health services in the community and therefore have high hospital care usage.  Best practice in homeless healthcare is to 'meet people where they're at', whether on the streets or in an A&E waiting room or hospital bed.  Too often, people experiencing homelessness are discharged from hospital without appropropriate accommodation in place and without having their wider health and social care needs addressed. This can result in a vicious cycle of homelessness, ill-health, and hospitalisations. Serena's PhD aims to develop new evidence and tools to support hospitals to better understand the needs of their homeless patients and to deliver evidence-based prevention, such as identification and recording of homelessness, referral to case management and/or specialist integrated care, assistance with housing and other social needs, screening, treatment initiation and referrals for chronic conditions, addictions, and infectious diseases, vaccinations, and discharge planning to appropriate housing or intermediate care facilities.

Serena's research employs mixed methods, including both quantitative epidemiology and qualitative methodologies.  She is also very interested in engaging people with lived experience of social exclusion in research and service design and has developed innovative methods for conducting patient and public involvement workshops with these groups.