Biography:
My working life, volunteer, and post-retirement experience has always been people-focused. With the Dept. for Work and Pensions I specialised in health-related return-to-work issues, based in Wakefield hospitals, being heavily involved in multi-disciplinary rehabilitation in the areas of Spinal Injury, Traumatic Brain Injury, Mental Health, and Forensic Psychiatry. Later I moved to Leeds NHS Adult Mental Health services as a member of the Care Programme Approach development team, later working as a Carer Support Worker.
My voluntary activities included Director and honorary Employment Advisor of Headway (National Brain Injury Association). I was instrumental in setting up and running Head Injury support groups in Wakefield and Leeds, and wrote ‘Return to work following Head Injury a Self Help Guide’. I was lay assistant to Chaplains at HMP Wakefield and Stanley Royd Psychiatric Hospital Wakefield. Most recently I designed and project led ‘Volunteer Listeners’ a National Lottery funded ‘Time to Shine’ project involving lay people acting as ‘Listeners’ in conversation with older people and turning the results into ‘stories’ used to identify good (and not so good) practices.
Research:
Many years ago, I undertook and presented, a national postal survey into the return-to-work experiences of Head Injured people. I revisited the subject for my Post-retirement MSc in Qualitative Psychology thesis, using Attributional Analysis techniques. Previously I led a full-time research project at Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust looking at the factors looked at by community mental health staff when considering discharging a service user, then working as a full time Research Officer, with West Yorkshire Mental Health Research Consortium looking primarily at Carers as researchers and their experiences of being involved in the care of their relatives.
I have been involved on two occasions as a lay researcher with Leeds University; in a NIHR/Leeds University Knowledge Mobilisation Research Fellowship programme called ‘Mobilising Knowledge Across Health and Social Care Boundaries’ and as an ‘Evaluator’ and ‘storyteller’ and in the Leeds University/Leeds City Council ‘SUFFICE’ project looking at the impact of the integration of teams of NHS and Social Care staff in Leeds on service user experiences.
I was a Steering Committee member and PPI representative in a NIHR funded UCL study of ‘Embedded models of knowledge co-production in the NHS’ and am currently a lay researcher on a project exploring the practices of falls risk assessment and prevention in hospitals using realist evaluation.
