With 15 years' experience in planning, delivery, organisation and research in health services, working in a national health policy organisation and having just started an Masters Degree in Health Policy at Imperial College London, I found out that my nearly one year old daughter had a rare neurodegenerative disease that could end her life.
Having started my career in health policy in the wake of the Baby P scandal, followed in quick succession by the horrors at Mid Staffs and then Winterbourne View, I wanted to play a role in transforming the health service to be more accountable, more joined up with the rest of the public sector and more focused on ensuring that the most vulnerable were supported to thrive, not just survive. My career took me on a fascinating journey through local primary care, supporting GPs to improve access to their services and reduce inequality, to Public Health, running two high street clinics and managing a host of wellbeing, coaching and other preventative lifestyle services within an inner London NHS Trust, through to working on the National Urgent and Emergency Care redesign programme at NHS England. And then my daughter was born, and her life and death jolted my career in an entirely different direction -almost back to where it began: trying to understand how what was once one of the best health systems in the world is able to so badly let down its most vulnerable citizens, but taking a different approach to make it better.
I started my career when the health service was well funded, forward thinking and focused on prevention, through Austerity I worked on projects around efficiency, improving planning, saving money. And then there was Covid 19. On the first day of the first national lockdown, a year after the death of my daughter with learning disabilities, I started a role in the National Learning Disability and Autism Programme.
My unique experience inside the central machinations of England's NHS, whilst trying to gain support for my own child with profoundly complex needs gives me a truly 360 degree perspective of this system. I see the gaps between policy and its implementation, how and why they are there, and the impact this has on children and their families.
Four years after my daughter's death, unable to instigate the changes so many families so desperately need, I decided to leave NHS. I have set up a social enterprise that works across-systems. My work is focused on ensuring that laws and policies relating to children with complex needs are upheld and delivered in the way in which they are intended. I build partnerships between families and those who are supposed to be supporting them. I provide system's level policy support, training for policy makers, service providers and commissioners and I hold independent roles within academic research specialising in models of care, policy implementation, behaviour science and systems thinking.
