I come from the Midlands and trained in London before moving to Brighton in 2002. I became a consultant in 2012. This is when I started working at BSMS, I then took up my formal university formal role in 2016.
When I was growing up, I liked science. I had an inspirational teacher who gave me the belief and encouragement to pursue my dreams. I knew from my early teenage years that I wanted to become a doctor. This was back in the early 1990s. I was the first person in my family to go to university and the first healthcare professional. Careers such as medicine were not a common path to follow at my school and there was no internet to support understanding the process of getting into medical school. Therefore, having a teacher who encouraged me, made me believe it was possible. She definitely changed my life and I enjoyed going back to say thank you to her when I qualified.
I have a hybrid role. I am a consultant respiratory physician at University Hospitals Sussex, where for a significant proportion of the time, I carry out clinical work. Within this, I look after inpatients on the ward in the respiratory unit, I am on call for respiratory medicine and carry out clinical teaching. I run the respitory infection outpatient service. Within my clinical medicine, I enjoy making the journey through ill health as best as possible for my patients and working in partnership with them in joint management of long-term conditions.
I am also the academic lead for student support at BSMS and the training programme director for respiratory medicine (post graduate) in the Kent, Surrey and Sussex region. I was recently appointed to the British thoracic society council and I sit on their education and training committee.
What led me to my current position now was, I love being a doctor and I really enjoyed teaching. Therefore, a position within a medical school where I knew I would be able to input into teaching felt right for me. Because our jobs as doctors are incredibly emotionally tough and this has been overlooked by generations of doctors, I am keen to develop a much greater emphasis on being able to support students with their own mental health and wellbeing by supporting developing infrastructure to make sure this is embedded into student and post graduate teaching and support. We need to take responsibility as a profession to care better for those within it. This will result in better care for patients. It is really rewarding work but there is long way to go.
I also want to make everyone from every background feel welcome and valued at medical school. This wish in part comes from my own background, having previously felt like a fish out of water during my first week of medical school in London in 1995. I want to be involved in improving the journey for all people.
My role at BSMS involves me chairing student-led committees, for example, the Student Affairs Committee and the Wellbeing Committee. I believe BSMS prides itself on giving students a strong voice and I really hope that is the case. I'm always really impressed with how committed our students are to improving the experience for themselves and their colleagues.
I also sit on other committees such as the Curriculum Management and Academic Board whereby we take the ideas that come from the boards to the students and vice versa. Day-to-day we deal with individual students who may be facing issues for whatever reason. We have a team of experienced student welfare advisors who help students with challenges in regard to an array of different issues or disabilities in order to give them the best possible educational experience.
I believe we have had a real explosion in mental ill health and, therefore, we have really tried to focus on implementing new initiatives, including suicide prevention training for our Year 1 students. The Wellbeing Committee came from that, and the focus of this committee is to emphasise how important student well-being is and bring ideas to improve the future of student well-being.
My biggest professional achievement was the day that I became a consultant because it was the culmination of all my hard work (and my family’s) and overcoming lots of challenges. There were extremely long hours for junior doctors back when I qualified in 2000 and there's quite a lot of sacrifice that goes into it at the beginning, as there is for today’s doctors in training. So passing that hurdle was a really big deal for me.
Without a doubt, the biggest challenge that we as doctors have faced is the Covid pandemic. I think it's quite easy now to forget just how frightening it was at the beginning. As respiratory physicians, we truly sat on the frontline. Therefore, after loving my job for many years, (with all the challenges it brings ) I found it really difficult. It was frightening to go home to my young children after working on the Covid wards all day and worry about transmission to them because we know we didn't really know anything about it back then. Obviously, that is not the case now. It was also difficult knowing your other services were suffering and, of course, we continue to see high pressure on respiratory services. Mostly though we found the emotional burden of loved ones not being together at the end of life the hardest. I had the sad privilege of relaying some last messages from families to their loved ones and of course I hope that will never happen again.
BSMS did a huge amount of work to make teaching as effective as possible online very quickly but, of course, it was a far cry from the university experience expected and wanted by students. We saw lots of mental health challenges during that time and our ability to be able to deal with them lessened due to minimal face-to-face presence. Therefore, in addition to our clinical work being challenging, it was a massively challenging time within the medical school dealing with the fallout of the mental ill health associated with Covid as well as the massive logistical issues in regards to redesigning courses and exams for the phase and office teams.
We now face the challenges of low staff morale in the health care work force. At a national level we need to listen and change to make things better. Retention of staff is now a major challenge for health care. Its tough on medical students seeing the BMA strikes and the growing upset and anger in the workforce.
In terms of the medical school, my future goals are really to establish our Wellbeing Committee and work on improving the experience for people with disabilities or those from a widening participation background, to make everything equitable and a very positive experience for them at BSMS. In my clinical role, my goals are to improve our outpatient services and try to get back on our feet after Covid.
In terms of my work/life balance, I think it is helpful having young children because as soon as I leave work, I am a mum so need to concentrate on that. We’re super into water sports in our family, we do loads of sea swimming, which my nine-year-old daughter's really into as well. We also do lots of other sea-based activities and spend a lot of time at the beach.
Prof Juliet Wright is an inspiration to me. I’m inspired by strong female leads that lead by example with fairness, wanting the best for patients and commitment to cause whilst having the whole package of maintaining a work/life balance.
The best piece of advice I would give my younger self is that I do have a seat at the table. I think I felt so different to other people and I was different to other people at medical school in 1995, but understanding that medical schools should be filled with all parts of society and you're deserving of success is important. I hope things are changing but there is so much work to do across all areas of inclusivity.
To young women just starting out in their careers, I would say pretty much the same thing. Go and work hard and do exactly what you want to do, don't be affected by traditional ideas of job roles. Also, find a strong mentor that can help you with overcoming challenges and maintain a work/life balance. Take care of yourself despite all the competing pressures that you have.