I have over twenty five years’ experience of working with emotional, psychological and mental health and wellbeing.  I have worked in a variety of roles in a range of settings but my commitment and passion for ‘the person’ has always been a consistent factor.

During this time I have led on clinical quality and clinical effectiveness, as well as developing care systems in a National Health Service (NHS) setting.  Some of this work has been collaborative, at a national level, as well as local, in the Staffordshire area.  I have experience of managing specialist mental health services in a large local NHS mental health trust.  Services included psychotherapy, liaison psychiatry – a branch of psychiatry that specialises in the consultative interface between general medicine and psychiatry; neuropsychiatry and acquired brain injury; perinatal mental health care, and addiction services.

In 2007 I graduated with a Masters Degree in Health Policy and Health Care Management at Birmingham University and have participated in various leadership programmes during my time working in the NHS.

Since leaving the NHS in 2007, I have managed an independent, mental health training enterprise (2007-2012), and then through a local advocacy charity, I coordinated the independent mental health advocacy (IMHA) service in Staffordshire for patients detained in hospital under the Mental Health Act, including working directly with patients, as an IMHA (2012-2014), and immediately prior to establishing Banish the Crows as an independent counselling psychotherapy offering in Stoke-on-Trent, I worked a in higher education as part of the counselling and mental health service, at Keele University (2014-2018).   In September 2018 I accepted a part-time position at Staffordshire University as a Lecturer in Counselling and Psychotherapy, teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate students. In 2019, concomitant to expanding my private psychotherapy practice, I transferred my status to one of Visiting Lecturer and then fully ended this arrangement in 2020.