Her current work includes research into quality improvement, patient opinion measures and clinical behaviour change. She leads the research programme of Warwick Diabetes Care which has a particular focus on research into the psychological aspects of living with diabetes and the effectiveness of education of primary care professionals in primary diabetes care. She is also engaged in a number of research projects with European collaborators. These include psychological and sociological aspects of living with diabetes, patient opinion measures involvement in primary care by older patients and the quality of primary care for visitors between European countries. Hilary is also UK representative of the European General Practice Research Network.

Hilary Hearnshaw joined the Centre in October 1998 as Senior Lecturer in Primary Care. Her first degree was a BSc in Mathematics from St Andrews University, followed by a PhD in Ergonomics at Loughborough, on human responses to vibrations. She then took a career break to bring up children and became a part-time, mature student at Leicester University, reading for a BSc in Psychology with Computer Studies. Having completed that degree, she became research associate in the Midlands Regional Research Laboratory at Leicester, studying the human factors of geographical information systems. In 1992, when the Eli Lilly National Clinical Audit Centre was established at Leicester, Hilary was appointed lecturer in clinical audit. Her work involved research in clinical audit and quality improvement for primary care as well as running training courses for clinical audit support staff and educating medical students. She also represented the UK as part of a Europe-wide study on patients' opinions of general practice (EUROPEP). She completed an MA in Applied Health Studies at De Montfort University in 1999.