Rupert Harwood

I became ill with a number of systemic autoimmune diseases in 2016 which took until 2021 to get diagnosed and left me with a wish to contribute to efforts to speed-up the diagnostic process and reduce its adverse impact on patients.

I began working as a patient researcher on the Cambridge University lupus and related connective tissue disease studies in 2019 and in 2022 began a part-time PhD in Swansea University Medical School. My study is exploring the role of patient-clinician interactions, and their organisational context, in the sustained misdiagnoses of neuorologically mediated systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases.