I grew up in south London as part of quite a health service family, my mother and many of my aunts were nurses. My parents were recruited from Ireland to come to England in the 1950s, my mother to work in the NHS and my father initially working at London transport. Even after my mother left nursing, she chose to work in healthcare. She was a practice manager for one of the first wave of large-scale health centres, housing multiple GP practices.
As I grew up, I was always interested in books and academic ideas and when I was in 6th Form college, an interested teacher suggested I apply to the University of Cambridge, through an entrance exam. Not knowing very much about universities, and nothing at all about Oxbridge, I took the exam and was pleased to gain a place. For my family, that was a huge moment, as my parents were both people with a great commitment to education, believing it is the door that opens up your chances in life, and they had very little chance to get that sort of education in their own lives. It made a big change in my life, which has always stayed with me in terms of our widening participation initiatives at the University, and the importance of recruiting people from varied backgrounds into healthcare work.
At university, I read English literature, French and studied philosophy, which all seems as if it couldn't be further away from medicine! However, each of those elements of my degree have been very helpful. They were all about being analytic and enquiring and understanding the concepts and the theories behind things, and that's been key for me working in the NHS with clinical colleagues, and on improvement projects.
My speciality nowadays is leadership development and I spend most of my time developing leaders at different levels of the NHS. However, when I first started in my work, I was a general management trainee in East London for the NHS, and I was responsible for the practical work in hospitals, helping things operate effectively. I did enjoy it, but soon realised I enjoyed more working with teams in terms of doing things differently. I got involved in training and development and enjoyed helping people to think about ways to deal with difficult problems in services. This led me to qualifying in a career in organisational change and service development and to my university role.
By the time I was in my early 30s, I had set up my own business as a training and development consultant, learning about running a company mainly in health care, but also in the wider small business world. I worked with The Kings Fund, a national think tank in health, as an associate. I helped set up the first Darzi Fellowship programme for young doctors there, helped establish an Aspiring Nurse Directors for London programme, and I worked with a wide range of health organisations and GPs nationwide.
I came to join BSMS when a GP lead at the Medical School asked me to help with setting up a postgraduate leadership programme for medical registrars. It was focused on how the NHS works and preparing people for their consultant roles in terms of what it takes to lead services. From those early beginnings, the leadership development work we do here has grown and developed substantially over the years since, with 100 postgraduates now studying our modules each year.
I have a number of current roles. I have just completed running the National Programme for Aspiring Chief Executives, run by the NHS Leadership Academy. It aims to develop chief executives who really understand the challenges in their communities, who are strongly committed to equality and diversity and who are willing to collaborate across organisations so that they focus on the connections across services as well as in their own hospital. We’ve had almost 50 chief executives through that programme, and many of those people have gained key leadership posts as a result.
The other large programme I run is for aspiring directors of health services, people like chief nurses, chief medical officers and chief finance officers. My role is supporting those people to successfully develop & work with the values and attitudes that the health service needs today.
At BSMS, I lead the MSc in Healthcare Leadership and Commissioning. We were originally asked to create this by local health services in the south-east who wanted a postgraduate course that was really going to develop people to understand how health care organisations work, and how they could improve.
We also offer a very successful Leadership and Education Fellowship, sponsored by Health Education England. This gives early career doctors an opportunity to take a year out of their training to work with the sponsorship of a local medical director in the South-East on service improvement projects in a hospital or healthcare organisation.
In terms of my own work outside BSMS, I coach on a one-to-one basis a wide range of senior NHS leaders at Director level. It’s interesting work and gives me a strong insight into their worlds and the challenges going on in services, as well as the opportunities for change. A lot of my coaching work is about supporting people to think through and manage the very difficult, complex problems they face on service issues.
One of the reasons I took up the consultancy approach as part of the way I do my work is because I do enjoy a variety of service settings and organisations. I hope the work I do outside BSMS can bring useful additional insights and connections for our BSMS postgraduate students. Coaching and the connected one-to-one relationship with people who are leading services remains my real passion overall.
In terms of future career plans, I've been working in and around health and social care most of my career, and I do also work in the small business environment and in other settings. Given Covid, this seems an important time to support people with the challenges we all face, so I'd definitely like to continue with my health focus, and also build on the work I've done in social care and the voluntary sector.
One of my biggest professional achievements is of course the leadership of the Chief Executives programme over the last five years, but also from much earlier in my career – the first national standards for HIV services in 1992. I was always very interested in service user perspectives and was one of a small team who produced these 1st service standards with the people using services. It was strongly service-user led and co-produced, which was ground-breaking at the time and this kind of service-user led work remains very important to me.
I have worked on improving Dementia care with Professor Sube Banerjee at BSMS and we absolutely put the service user and their carer’s experiences at the heart of how we tried to consider the redesign of care and services. I think that the chief executive work, the work in the HIV world and the work in dementia care are the three things I'm most proud of.
In terms of the people who inspire me, I've kept a lifelong love of reading since my degree days, and some of the people who inspire me most are writers. Coming from an Irish background, I think Edna O'Brien, is one of the world's great writers. She’s been very inspiring in terms of rights for women and fairness for women; she bravely connected with the young women who had been abducted by Boko Haram and has written a book about that experience and their experiences. Other female writers too, like Maya Angelou, who offered an absolutely inspirational voice from African American women's achievements throughout her life.
In terms of most inspiring though, I'd have to say it’s most definitely my parents who came to England from backgrounds of poverty, didn’t have the opportunities I have had for an education and overcame all the hurdles of being new immigrants to England in the nineteen fifties, including a lot of discrimination against Irish people at that time. They successfully established a life together and brought us up and educated us all. I'm really proud of them for what they did and the life they made for us.
I think the biggest challenge I’ve faced personally is combining my much-loved children with my career. I didn't have my children till I was older, at the heart of a successful and busy career phase. The juggle of bringing up children and also trying to have your own career was a challenge. I think children raise questions about where you prioritise, where you put your energy and how you manage it all. My thoughts would be, make the most of your family time as they really will grow up so fast! Learn from whoever you can; learning from other people who've done it before is one of the ways I’ve learned how to juggle things.
I love living in Brighton, it's a short walk from my house to the sea and so I tend to relax with a walk on the beach in the fresh air. I love art, books, & music, anything that takes me out of the world of my day job and out and about. I've got a typically very tiny Brighton town garden, but it does give me great joy and I relax there by pottering around. I greatly enjoy seeing friends and being sociable, particularly after not being able to do so for much of these last two years during COVID. It’s been good reconnecting with people.
When I was growing up, I didn’t know what work I wanted to do, but I knew that I wanted to do something that did some good in the world. I have been taken under the wing of some really good leaders and people who took an interest in me. I was lucky to have a strong family network and later on in life a very supportive spouse. At work, I found people who helped me think about what work I really wanted to do. We do need people to look at us in a positive developmental way and hold a mirror up to us in terms of our aspirations and interests.
I think the best piece of advice I would give my younger self is give things time and a bit more space. When I was younger, I thought I had to keep pushing at things to make them happen, but as I've got older, I've learnt that quite often if you stand back and make a space, things sometimes happen in a better way. I think also don't be so worried that you have to do it all yourself. I've learnt as I’ve got older to do lots of things with other people; I very rarely work just on my own nowadays.
My advice to other women would be to find good mentors and sponsors for your careers. It’s important to realise that you’re not the first one and you’re not on your own. When I went to Cambridge, I went to Girton College, which was founded by women. At first, I found it all quite a culture shock to someone of my background. What helped me was the realisation that I was in a college that all the women before me had worked to establish so that young women like me could now get their university educations. There was something about having a sense that someone had gone before me and paved the way that sparked me to think ‘what next?’ ‘What can I do now that adds to their achievement?’