Nicola West

Nicola West is a registered nurse and global-health researcher whose work sits at the intersection of clinical care, implementation science, programme leadership and community partnership. Her experience across Canada and Tanzania has focused on how interventions become usable and sustainable when specialist capacity is limited, care pathways cross multiple services, and trust, culture and everyday workflow influence whether people can benefit from an innovation.

Her research interests include cervical-cancer prevention, nurse-led and task-shifted models of care, chronic-disease prevention, palliative and cancer care, maternal health, cultural safety, stigma reduction, participatory research and digital health. Across these areas, she brings particular attention to what happens after a promising intervention leaves the protocol: who delivers it, how teams are trained and supported, whether follow-up is maintained, how communities experience it, and what health systems need in order to sustain it.

Nicola has played major programme-management and research roles in Tanzania-linked work through Queen’s University and the Pamoja Tunaweza–WEMA trajectory. Her experience includes multi-site programme coordination, research-team training, budgeting and funding compliance, process and programme evaluation, student supervision, stakeholder collaboration, and clinical/community implementation. Her cervical-cancer work has included smartphone-supported screening, SMS and eVoucher approaches, SEVIA, HPV self-sampling, patient navigation, health-system appraisal and the broader NECST programme.

Within WEMA Global Health, Nicola contributes across WEMA Inc., WHIT and GHIRL. She is an important bridge between scientific design and the operational realities of ethical, high-quality research—helping connect researchers, health services, communities and partners while supporting the teams and systems required to turn evidence into practice.