Lorna Rothery

Lorna Rothery is a digital publication editor at Open Access Government, specialising in health and social care coverage built around in-depth conversations with experts and organisations working on complex health challenges. Her remit spans healthcare, food and animal health, and she commissions and shapes opinion pieces and analysis that connect policy, research and frontline experience in these areas. Across her work, she returns to themes of equity, access and system-level reform in areas such as antimicrobial resistance, immunisation, ageing, stroke care, childhood cancer, Indigenous health, and maternal and child health.

Strengthening global immunisation response

In her coverage of immunisation, Rothery focuses on how vaccine programmes operate in fragile, conflict-affected and climate-vulnerable contexts, and what this means for global health security. Her interview with a senior leader at Gavi examines the organisation’s strategy for 2026–2030, highlighting the need to expand vaccine portfolios, support outbreak response and reach zero-dose children and underserved communities.

She draws out the links between immunisation, poverty reduction and resilience, treating vaccines as a cornerstone of sustainable development rather than a narrow clinical intervention. Her questions emphasise cross-sector collaboration, differentiated support for humanitarian settings and the operational details of funding and programme design, making the piece useful for stakeholders concerned with implementation as much as policy.

Advancing the narrative and approaches to population ageing

Rothery’s work on ageing centres on healthy population ageing and the infrastructures required to support people across the life course. In her interview with a global advisor at the International Federation on Ageing, she explores long-term care, age-friendly environments and efforts to combat ageism, framing ageing as a demographic shift that can bring benefits if systems adapt. The discussion covers integrated and community-based care, with attention to physical and mental wellbeing and the importance of enabling older people to continue doing what they value.

In edition introductions, her role is highlighted in bringing expert perspectives on healthy ageing into the masthead’s diseases and conditions focus, reinforcing her interest in how policy and practice can align around older adults’ needs. Her approach is to move beyond headline statistics on ageing populations and look at governance, multi-stakeholder collaboration and the practical enablers of better outcomes.

Breaking down the key components of effective post-stroke care

Rothery’s stroke coverage examines both clinical pathways and the wider psychological and social impacts of stroke. Her interview with a stroke researcher and fellow of the European Stroke Organisation addresses early detection, symptom awareness and the importance of rapid treatment, but also the depression and wellbeing challenges that many patients face.

She brings artificial intelligence into the picture as a tool for improving post-stroke care, probing how technology might be harnessed to support diagnosis, rehabilitation and long-term monitoring.

The piece stresses the need for collaboration between government and healthcare providers to ensure resources for post-stroke care, including support for patients and their families, and it treats post-stroke care as an ongoing, community-based process rather than a discrete hospital episode. This systems perspective on a single condition is characteristic of her health reporting: detailed clinical context combined with questions about infrastructure, funding and awareness.

Artificial intelligence and the future of maternal and child health

Rothery extends her scrutiny of technology in healthcare to maternal and child health, where she explores how artificial intelligence might reshape services and outcomes. In her health and social care coverage on this topic, she situates AI within broader discussions of access, quality and equity, rather than treating it as a standalone innovation.

The framing emphasises future-oriented policy choices and the need to balance innovation with safeguards for vulnerable populations, underscoring her interest in governance and ethics in health systems.

This work sits alongside her repeated engagement with childhood cancer and paediatric care, where she has interviewed experts about geographic disparities in access to therapies, survival rates and the challenges of developing targeted treatments for children. By bringing together maternal, child and adolescent health topics, she builds a coherent focus on early-life health equity across different diseases and care settings.

Childhood cancer, Indigenous health and antimicrobial resistance

Rothery frequently returns to childhood cancer, using interviews with organisations and researchers to illuminate gaps in suitable therapies, regional disparities and the impact of these factors on survival rates. Her work highlights pan-European and international efforts to improve outcomes for children and adolescents with cancer, and it pays attention to advocacy, policy and the role of networks that connect families, clinicians and policymakers.

She also covers Indigenous Peoples’ health, focusing on collaborative and culturally sensitive approaches and the commitments made by member states to advance Indigenous health rights, further reinforcing her interest in equity and marginalised communities. In her coverage of cancer and antimicrobial resistance, she spotlights infections as a leading cause of death among cancer patients and explores the interplay between oncology and AMR as an urgent public health threat.

Across these pieces, she ties disease-specific content to broader questions of health equity, stewardship, global collaboration and the need for integrated responses to systemic challenges.

Beyond individual articles, Rothery plays an editorial role in shaping health content across Open Access Government’s editions, curating contributions on communicable diseases, ageing, cancer, mental health, research and innovation, and environment and energy from government, academia and industry.

She has worked in publishing since before joining the masthead, with experience writing for both newspapers and magazines, which informs her ability to translate technical material into clear, accessible prose for a broad policy-focused audience. Her health coverage consistently privileges expert voices, detailed case studies and the links between policy frameworks and everyday patient experience, making her work distinct from generic beat reporting that centres on short-term news or single-issue campaigns.